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If a black mamba bites you, the treatment that saves your life is made much as it was more than a century ago: by injecting diluted venom into horses, sheep, or even camels and harvesting the antibodies from their blood. This episode explains why. Venom works too fast for the body to build its own defense, so a large animal serves as a surrogate immune system. The plasma is purified and often freeze dried into a powder that keeps for up to five years without refrigeration. The price is risk, since animal proteins can trigger serum sickness or anaphylaxis in the patient.

The history runs from Felice Fontana's 1767 observation that venomous snakes survive their own bites, through Henry Sewall's pigeons in 1887, to Albert Calmette's horse serum against Indian cobra venom in 1894 and Vital Brazil's multi-species antivenoms in 1901. The present is less heroic. Production is costly, the people bitten most are rural workers who cannot pay, and makers walk away. The episode closes with possible replacements, from an opossum protein to synthetic antibodies and one man's unusual blood.

• Doctors give antivenom even to patients allergic to horses, because anaphylaxis can be managed in intensive care and paralysis from venom cannot be undone.
• Sewall raised pigeons' tolerance until they survived seven times the normal lethal dose of rattlesnake venom.
• The United States ran out of in-date coral snake antivenom in 2009 after the maker judged a few dozen bites a year unprofitable.
• Without antivenom, hospitals may use neostigmine, which floods nerve junctions with the body's own signal to keep paralyzed muscles working.
• Antibodies from a man who let snakes bite him for years, combined with the enzyme inhibitor varespladib, protected mice from lethal venom of several species.

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The showdown at high noon, with two men waiting for a flinch above low holsters, is mostly a Hollywood invention. This episode sets the cinema against the record. In the Old West, being quick on the draw meant being hot tempered and ready to pull a weapon over a slight insult. Real gunfights were spontaneous, close range, and often drunken. The rare formal duel was a crude version of the Southern code duello, fought standing sideways with careful aim. Holsters were soft leather worn high for comfort, and many men carried revolvers in a waistband, a coat pocket, or a slotted metal Bridgeport rig.

Because the history never matched the films, enthusiasts built a sport that did. Governed chiefly by the World Fast Draw Association, competitors fire blanks at balloons or wax bullets at metal plates, timed to the thousandth of a second. Average human reaction time is 0.2 to 0.25 seconds, yet top shooters react in 0.145 and then draw, cock, and fire in just over 0.06. The episode explains the techniques and the neurology that make this possible, and why reflexes trained for a game can be dangerous when the target is not a balloon.

• Wild Bill Hickok, Doc Holliday, John Wesley Hardin, and Billy the Kid are cited as rare exceptions in an era when most men were simply trying to survive an ugly close fight.
• Wax bullets are driven by the primer alone, with no gunpowder, which lets the sport chase speed without lethal risk.
• The open class standing balloon record is 0.208 seconds from the light to the pop, achieved by fanning or slip hammering a single action revolver.
• Bob Munden, named by Guinness the fastest man with a gun who ever lived, was a gunsmith who rebuilt his revolvers to keep up with his hands.
• A fatal game of quick draw between two American sergeants in Iraq in June 2011 shows why professional training puts judgment and target identification ahead of raw speed.

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In the earliest surviving ballads, Robin Hood punches a friend over an archery contest, and one of his men murders a page boy to leave no witness to a prison escape. This episode traces how that figure became the cheerful nobleman who robs from the rich to give to the poor. The Robin of 15th century texts such as Robin Hood and the Monk is a yeoman, a self-sufficient commoner with no title, who fights with a sword and pursues a personal war against the Sheriff of Nottingham and wealthy abbots. He runs no charity. His appeal lay in humiliating the officials who squeezed ordinary people.

Each later age rewrote him. The May Games and parish church ales made him a festival mascot and added Maid Marian, borrowed from a French pastoral play, and the comic Friar Tuck. In 1521 the historian John Major moved him to the 1190s and the reign of Richard the Lionheart, and the playwright Anthony Munday made him the dispossessed Earl of Huntingdon, a rebel safe enough for Tudor elites. The episode also weighs the real outlaws whose lives may lie behind the ballads and names the writer who invented the philanthropist.

• By the middle of the 13th century, court clerks were using the name Robin Hood as a stock alias for unknown bandits, much like John Doe.
• Court records from 1226 show a Robert Hod of York who owed a debt to St. Mary's, had his goods confiscated, and became a fugitive.
• After the Battle of Evesham in 1265, the rebel Roger Godberd retreated into Sherwood Forest with a band of men and fought local authorities for years.
• Joseph Ritson, a supporter of the French Revolution, published a ballad collection in 1795 that recast Robin as a champion of the poor against the rich.
• Walter Scott's Ivanhoe in 1819 made him a Saxon patriot, and Howard Pyle's 1883 children's book removed the remaining violence.

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On a 17th century Italian dressing table, among the perfume and combs, sat a small glass vial painted with the image of a saint. It was sold as Manna di San Nicola, a common devotional item, and it held a poison blamed for more than 600 deaths. This episode tells the story of Giulia Tofana and the network that sold it to women with no other way out. Marriage was an unbreakable contract, divorce did not exist, and authorities returned fleeing wives to violent husbands. The recipe is traced to Sicily in the early 1630s and to Teofania di Adamo, thought to be Tofana's mother, who was executed.

Tofana and her associate Gironima Spana carried the formula to Rome and built a ring of six female poisoners with a supply chain running through a priest whose brother was an apothecary. The mixture of arsenic and lead, likely with belladonna, was colorless and tasteless, and four drops given over several days produced what looked like natural illness. The episode follows the ring's exposure, the crackdown of 1659, and the poison's long afterlife, from a French murder case to the deathbed fears of Mozart and a modern social media slogan.

• Father Girolamo of the church of Sant'Agnese in Agone supplied the arsenic, obtained through his apothecary brother.
• Sweet tasting sugar of lead is thought to have masked the bitter metallic edge of the arsenic, leaving nothing to notice in wine or soup.
• The slow decline gave a husband time to confess and, more usefully for his wife, to finalize his will before the fourth drop.
• In 1659 five women from the ring were publicly executed in Rome and 40 clients were sentenced to life in prison, while Tofana herself is believed to have died before the arrests.
• In 1791 the ailing Mozart told his wife someone had given him aqua tofana, a claim with no evidence behind it, and the name has resurfaced online as the acronym MATGA.

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Pioneers in the 1800s believed that breathing near a Gila monster could kill you. Today a drug modeled on a peptide in its venom is injected into millions of people. This episode separates the frontier legend from the animal: the largest native lizard in the United States, up to 22 inches long, armored with bony plates and patterned in pink, yellow, and black. It was named Heloderma suspectum in 1869 by Edward Drinker Cope, who suspected from its grooved teeth that it was venomous. Settlers went further and claimed it had no anus and exhaled poison gas.

The real lizard is a recluse. It spends about 90 percent of its life underground, stores fat in its tail and water in its bladder, and can live for a year on three or four meals of eggs and nestlings. Its venom is a defense, built to make a coyote let go, and it is chewed into a wound, not injected. In the early 1990s researchers found a venom peptide, exendin-4, that mimics the human hormone GLP-1 but resists the enzyme that destroys it. That discovery reshaped the treatment of diabetes and obesity.

• In 1891 Tombstone physician George Goodfellow paid five dollars a head for live specimens, let one bite his finger, spent five days in bed, and recovered.
• An adult can eat a third of its body weight in one meal, and a wild Gila monster may be active on the surface only 10 to 14 days a year.
• The venom glands sit in the lower jaw, and venom wicks up grooved teeth by capillary action while the lizard grinds its jaws.
• The FDA approved exenatide, a synthetic version of the lizard peptide sold as Byetta, in 2005, opening the way for the GLP-1 drugs.
• Arizona protected the species in 1952, and relocating one is often fatal because it burns its reserves trying to walk back to its burrow.

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On April 21, 1986, some 30 million people watched Geraldo Rivera break into a sealed chamber beneath Chicago's Lexington Hotel, once Al Capone's headquarters, and find dirt, debris, and a few empty bottles. This episode tells how The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults came to exist. A construction survey of the derelict hotel turned up walled-off chambers, and producers John Joslyn and Doug Llewelyn insisted the opening be broadcast live. ABC, CBS, and NBC passed. Tribune Entertainment sold it station by station and spent 900,000 dollars on four months of preparation.

The host needed it as badly as the producers did. Rivera had just been fired from ABC News after a public dispute with Roone Arledge over a spiked report. With two hours to fill and about ten minutes of real action, the show padded itself with Prohibition history while a medical examiner and IRS agents stood by on set. When the wall came down on nothing, Rivera thought his career was finished. The ratings said otherwise, and the episode explains why a famous flop became a template for hype.

• A medical examiner waited in case of human remains, and Internal Revenue Service agents were on hand to claim unpaid taxes from any hidden fortune.
• Rivera held up an empty bottle and suggested it once held bathtub gin, then admitted on air that it seemed they had struck out.
• Afterward he crossed the street, drank tequila, and shut himself in his hotel room behind a do not disturb sign, as he recounted in his 1991 autobiography.
• It became the highest rated syndicated special to that point, and West Coast viewers tuned in even though the empty vault had already been reported.
• The formula survived: Joslyn produced Return to the Titanic Live in 1987, and a 2019 vault opening in Darwin, Australia, revealed cobwebs, loan records, and two more locked safes.

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The nickname suggests a man breaking kneecaps in an alley. The real Frank Nitti delegated violence and watched the numbers. Born in 1886 in the Campania region of Italy, he arrived in Brooklyn at seven, left school after the seventh grade, worked as a barber, and left home at 14. He ran with Al Capone's older brothers in the Navy Street Boys, though the two men were never cousins. An early scheme taught him caution: after he stole from his Galveston partners and fled to Chicago, they caught him in Houston and forced him to hand the money back.

In Chicago, Nitti built the supply chain that moved Canadian whiskey by rail and truck to thousands of speakeasies, and his shared roots with Capone let him negotiate with traditional Italian factions. This episode follows him through the 1931 tax convictions, where Capone drew 11 years and the quieter Nitti only 18 months, into his years as boss, his turn from liquor to labor union extortion, a police attempt on his life, and the Hollywood shakedown that led his own lieutenants to demand he take the fall.

• When Capone went to prison in Philadelphia in 1929, he left a three man committee in charge, with Nitti at the head of operations.
• On December 19, 1932, Detective Sergeant Harry Lang shot an unarmed Nitti three times during a raid, then wounded himself to claim self defense.
• Court testimony pointed to a 15,000 dollar bounty and to Mayor Anton Cermak, who was killed in Miami two months later by a gunman officially aiming at Franklin D. Roosevelt.
• Through Willie Bioff and the stagehands and projectionists union, the Outfit extorted major studios until Bioff turned informant in 1943.
• Claustrophobic and facing prison, Nitti walked to a rail yard on March 19, 1943, the day before his grand jury date, and shot himself at 57.

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The Wild Bunch of the 1890s, also called the Doolin-Dalton Gang, began with a pay dispute. Bill Doolin, George Newcomb, and Charlie Pierce were hired guns for Bob Dalton until a bloody train robbery at Adair in July 1892 convinced them he was shortchanging them. They quit. Three months later Dalton tried to rob two banks at once in Coffeyville, Kansas, and four of the five gang members involved were killed. Visiting the Daltons' grieving mother in Kingfisher, Doolin proposed a new crew to avenge the dead, and Bill Dalton said yes.

Revenge was the pitch, but the business was banks and trains. From a base in the village of Ingalls the gang became the Oklahoma Long Riders, famous for ankle-length dusters and shielded by locals who resented railroads and banks. This episode follows their run from the Spearville bank job to the Battle of Ingalls on September 1, 1893, and the 1894 trial that pushed a furious judge to tell marshals to bring the outlaws in dead. It ends with a hundred deputies, the telegraph, and a chartered locomotive closing in on men still fighting on horseback.

• Two teenage girls known as Cattle Annie and Little Britches spied for the gang, watching general stores for lawmen buying ammunition in bulk.
• During the June 1893 Cimarron train robbery, Doolin took a Winchester bullet through his left foot and limped in pain for the rest of his life.
• After a jury convicted Arkansas Tom of manslaughter rather than murder, Judge Frank Dale told Marshal E.D. Nix his deputies need not bother with arrests.
• At Dover in April 1895 the gang could not open a safe holding an army payroll and ended up taking pocket watches and loose change from passengers.
• Only two of the eleven core members lived to see the 20th century, yet the gang inspired comic books, films, and the Eagles' 1973 album Desperado.

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She rode with Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch as the companion of Harry Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid, and was hunted by the Pinkerton Detective Agency across two continents. Yet almost nothing about Etta Place can be proven. A Pinkerton description from 1906 gives her age as 27 or 28, her height as about five foot four, her weight as 110 to 115 pounds, and her hair as brown. There is no birth certificate and no family record, and even the name is doubtful, since Place was the maiden name of Longabaugh's mother.

This episode tests the three best known attempts to give her an identity. Ethel Bishop lived in a San Antonio brothel around the corner from a Wild Bunch hangout and was listed in the 1900 census as an unemployed music teacher. Cattle rustler Ann Bassett was declared a match by a Los Alamos scientist in 1992. Fort Worth hotel keeper Eunice Gray once said she had fled to South America. Each theory fails, and the trail runs from a ranch at Cholila, Argentina, to San Francisco in 1907 and a last strange sighting in Chile before Hollywood wrote the ending for her.

• Dr. Thomas G. Kyle overlaid photographs and cited a matching cowlick, but records show Ann Bassett was arrested and married in Utah in 1903 while Etta Place was in South America.
• The Eunice Gray theory lasted until 2007, when genealogist Donna Donnell found Gray's niece and photographs that plainly showed a different woman.
• In 1909 a woman matching her description asked the U.S. vice consul in Antofagasta, Chile, for help obtaining a death certificate for the Sundance Kid. It was never issued.
• Later rumors placed her in Paraguay, dead in a 1922 shootout in Chubut, Argentina, a suicide in 1924, or living quietly until 1966.
• Screenwriter William Goldman made her a schoolteacher for the 1969 film because he thought her too attractive to have worked in a brothel, and Katharine Ross fixed that image in public memory.

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The killer bee panic of the late 20th century began with a farming problem. In 1956, Brazilian biologist Warwick E. Kerr imported African honeybees to cross with European strains that were sluggish in tropical heat. He kept them near Rio Claro behind queen excluders, metal screens that let workers out and kept queens in. In October 1957 a visiting beekeeper, thinking the screens were slowing the workers down, took them off. Twenty-six swarms escaped, and their descendants crossed the Amazon and Central America, reaching Texas by 1990 at up to two kilometers a day.

This episode separates the horror movie from the biology. The venom of an Africanized honeybee is identical to that of a gentle European bee. The danger is behavior: a huge alarm zone, far more guards, and pursuit of up to 400 meters. It also explains how the hybrids outbred and overthrew European colonies, why a plan to dilute them at Panama could not have worked, and how the feared invader became the preferred bee of Central and South American beekeepers, prized for heavy honey yields and for fighting off the mites that are destroying European hives.

• Over 90 percent of bees at the front of the expansion carried African mitochondrial DNA, meaning an unbroken female line ran from the escaped queens to Texas.
• In a tactic called usurpation, Africanized bees slip into a weakened European hive, kill its queen, and install their own.
• The alarm pheromone smells like artificial bananas, and victims can receive ten times the stings of a European attack, enough to cause kidney failure.
• A single Africanized hive can produce up to 100 kilograms of honey in a season, and the bees bite the legs off parasitic Varroa mites.
• Cold winters have stalled the northward spread, while in Puerto Rico, where the bees arrived in 1994, a gentle Africanized strain has evolved on its own.