Animal-based names are surprisingly common when it comes to units of measurement. In addition to horsepower (which usually measures the output of engines or motors) and hogsheads (today mostly used for alcohol), there’s also the mickey — a semi-official means of measuring the speed of a computer mouse. Named after a certain Disney character who’s probably the world’s most famous rodent, it’s specifically used to describe the smallest measurable movement the device can take. In real terms, that equals 1/200 of an inch, or 0.1 millimeter. Both the sensitivity (mickeys per inch) and speed (mickeys per second) of a computer mouse are measured this way by computer scientists.

Mickey Mouse wasn’t the character’s original name.

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The character was originally called Mortimer Mouse, which was changed at the behest of Lillian Disney, wife of Walt Disney. That name was reused for Mickey’s longtime rival, who first appeared in 1936.

Had the original name for the device stuck, it’s unlikely this measurement system would have come about. The mouse was briefly known as a “bug” when it was invented at the Stanford Research Institute to make computers more user-friendly, though that seems to have been a working title that no one was especially fond of. (That version of the device was also extremely primitive compared to the mice of today — it even had a wooden shell.) As for how the mouse got its current name, no one can quite remember, except that that’s what it looked like.

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On January 9, 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs revealed the iPhone to the world. Since then, Apple’s pricey slab of glass stuffed with technology has become synonymous with the word “smartphone” (sorry, Android fans). But smartphones predate the iPhone by more than a decade. To pinpoint the smartphone’s true birthdate, look back to November 23, 1992, and the introduction of IBM’s Simon at a trade show in Las Vegas. Today, IBM is best known for supercomputers, IT solutions, and enterprise software, but in the ’80s and early ’90s, the company was a leader in consumer electronics — a position it hoped to solidify with Simon.

The Finnish telecommunications company Nokia was originally a paper mill.

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Nokia is a fixture of cell technology — you’ve almost certainly heard their flagship ringtone, an adaptation of Francisco Tárrega’s “Gran Vals.” But the company actually began as a paper mill in 1865. In fact, it’s only been primarily a telecommunications company for about 30 years.

Simon was a smartphone in every sense of the word. It was completely wireless and had a digital assistant, touchscreen, built-in programs (calculator, to-do list, calendar, sketch pad, and more), and third-party apps, something even the original iPhone didn’t have. The idea was so ahead of its time, there wasn't even a word for it yet — “smartphone” wasn’t coined for another three years. Instead, its full name when it debuted to the larger public in 1993 was the Simon Personal Communicator, or IBM Simon for short. But there’s a reason there isn’t a Simon in everyone’s pocket today. For one thing, the phone had only one hour of battery life. Once it died, it was just a $900 brick (technology had a long way to go before smartphones became pocket-sized; Simon was 8 inches long by 2.5 inches wide). Cell networks were still in their infancy, so reception was spotty at best, which is why the Simon came with a port for plugging into standard phone jacks. In the mid-aughts, increases in carrier capacity and the shrinking of electronic components created the perfect conditions for the smartphones most of us know today. Unfortunately for Simon, it was too late. 

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On Christmas Day 1741, Anders Celsius, a professor at Uppsala University in Sweden, took the world’s first temperature measurement using degrees Celsius — well, kind of. His scale had one big difference compared to the system we use today: It was backward. Instead of 0 degrees marking the freezing point of water, it instead marked the boiling point, while 100 degrees marked the freezing point. The reason for this arrangement may have been in part to avoid using negative numbers when taking temperature readings. After all, it’s pretty cold in Sweden a majority of the year, and air temperature never gets hot enough to boil water (thank goodness). 

The U.S. was the first English-speaking country to adopt a decimal system for money.

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The U.S. populace doesn’t generally use the metric system, but it was the first country to create a decimal monetary system (100 pennies equals a dollar) with the Coinage Act of 1792. Three years later, revolutionary France adopted the decimal franc.

Celsius’ scale, then known as the centigrade (or “100-step”) scale, remained this way for the rest of his life, but in 1745 — one year after his death — scientist Carl Linnaeus (of taxonomy fame) ordered a thermometer with the scale adjusted to our modern orientation. Several other scientists also independently reversed the scale. Yet it wasn’t until some two centuries later, in 1948, that the International Bureau of Weights and Measures decided to rename “centigrade” to Celsius, in part to fall in line with the other major temperature scales named after their creators, such as Daniel Fahrenheit and William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin. 

Although the Swedish scientist didn’t invent, or even use, the precise scale that now bears his name, his groundbreaking work is still worthy of the accolade. Before Celsius, a couple dozen thermometers were in use throughout the world, and many of them were frustratingly inaccurate and inconsistent (some were based on the melting point of butter, or the internal temperature of certain animals). Celsius’ greatest contribution was devising a system that could accurately capture temperature under a variety of conditions, and his name now graces weather maps around the world (excluding the U.S., of course). 

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Slime molds, sometimes affectionately referred to as “The Blob,” defy scientific explanation — literally. They’re not plants, animals, or even fungi (as scientists believed before DNA sequencing came along). Instead, slime molds are considered protists, which one scientist describes as a catch-all term for “everything we don’t really understand.” Slime molds also defy our understanding of sex, since they are capable of assuming more than 700 different sexes depending on their genetics. They even complicate our ideas about intelligence. Alone, slime molds are simple single-celled creatures, but together they form a complex network that can remember and exhibit plenty of smarts.

Slime molds are the only organism without a nervous system.

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Although slime molds perform impressive feats in a group, alone they are just a single-celled organism without a nervous system. Nervous systems are more common among multicellular organisms; only the sea sponge and a few microscopic multicellular organisms lack them.

For example, slime molds such as Physarum polycephalum are expert maze solvers. They approach a maze completely differently than your average human, who might start out on one path only to hit a dead end, backtrack, and then test another path. A slime mold, on the other hand, spreads itself over the entire surface of the maze and then reorganizes its body, leaving behind the most efficient path to get from Point A to Point B. Of course, slime molds didn’t start out by solving mazes for fun or science: In the wild, Physarum polycephalum has evolved to spread out its pseudopodia (a network of tube-like tendrils) to locate food such as bacteria and fungal spores. Once the food has been found, the slime mold creates the most efficient pathway to that food possible — all without a brain or nervous system. Scientists can still only theorize about how slime molds transport information along their bodies. And although they’ve oozed around the planet for perhaps a billion years, slime molds are only recently getting the respect they deserve. In 2019, the Paris Zoo created an exhibit celebrating the slime mold, a decision that went viral and captured the attention of the world. Well, better late than never.

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