MythBusters.com

Most Americans believe in a constitutional right to privacy -- but does it really exist? The answer is yes, but it's not as clear-cut as most people think.

In early 2003, Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania announced his belief that no American has a Constitutional right to privacy, a shocking assertion to hear from a high government official. Because this was inserted as an aside in a more controversial statement, it was mostly overlooked -- but not entirely.

Pundits have been weighing in the subject sporadically ever since. The dismaying fact is, Santorum was right -- to a certain extent. There's no specific mention of the word "privacy" anywhere in the U.S. Constitution. But that doesn't mean that the subject isn't covered there, and it's time that myth was busted.

If you're a writer, you need to know your copyrights -- and your copyright myths.

Copyright myths are surprisingly abundant, even among writers, publishers, and other wordsmiths. They tend to be based either on out-of-date facts, or simple confusion with somewhat different concepts. In this article, we'll take a close look at five myths about the magical copyright, and reveal the truth about each.

If you're not sure how to tell fact from meteorological fiction, read on as we shed some light on five familiar hurricane myths.

Hurricanes may be a way of life on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, but since Katrina and Rita, no one takes them and the associated hurricane myths for granted anymore. A lot of people know better than to try to ride them out now, too.

Nevertheless, there are a few persistent myths that can get you and yours hurt -- or even killed -- if you accept them at face value. Let's take a closer look at five of the big ones, shall we?

Have you fallen prey to common PC privacy myths? Check and see.

Even this deep into the Information Age, most people are still plagued by certain PC privacy myths. For example: if you think deleting a file erases it from your computer, then you've fallen for one of the most prevalent myths. As any hacker could tell you, a file remains in memory, somewhere, until it's actively overwritten.

Even then, it may still be recoverable. Back in the old days, if you wanted to be rid of a document, you could tear it up and burn it, and it would be gone for good. With computers, a document might linger, at least in fragmentary form, for years...and that's the least of your PC privacy worries.

While you can expect a legal right to privacy in regards to your snail mail, email privacy is another thing altogether.

Email privacy myths are among the most persistent of the Information Age. They tend to linger, even as more people come to realize that, given the insecurity of the World Wide Web and other forms of electronic information exchange, very little of our personal information is truly confidential anymore.

We Americans expect that our postal mail will remain absolutely private, because that's a right guaranteed by the Constitution. We tend to extend that assumption to electronic mail, too; but the fact is, you just can't have the same expectation of privacy with email as you do with "snail" mail. In this article, we'll explain why.

If there's one subject we can count on to provide us with abundant misperceptions, it's history -- which is why we're returned to take another look at history myths.

Why are there so many history myths? Probably because as kids, we tend to accept whatever our teachers tell us as gospel. While teachers don't usually mean us harm, they've been known to pass on the occasional, accidental morsel of misinformation. Some myths get passed down this way for centuries.

The upshot is that some things we know to be true simply aren't, and history seems to offer more examples than most fields of study. That's why we've come back to the subject for this episode of Mythbusters. Here are three more popular myths we've ferreted out, along with the truth about each.

Myth about cats are exceedingly common in our society, so we thought it was about time to follow up on our earlier two-parter on the subject.

A few weeks back, we examined eight common myths about cats, and (hopefully) added a leavening of truth to the prevailing feline folklore. Unsurprisingly, this barely scratched the surface (so to speak) of what turned out to be a rather fascinating and complex subject.

And so, in our unending quest to bust the myths that so pervade human understanding of the universe, we thought we'd take another look at the matter. After all, we dug up so much cool stuff the first time that we never got to use... So here you are: four more common cat myths!

From cross-eyed bears to cross-eyed babies, we've got more great myth-heard song lyrics for you to groove to in this, our second helping on the subject.

In this article, we once again sing the praises of myth-heard song lyrics. Why? Because after all these years, there are still a few of us who cheerfully sing about "Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear" in the classic church hymn "Keep Thou My Way." In fact, Ed McBain once wrote an interesting novel with that very title.

Most of us realize it's really "gladly the cross I'd bear," even as some of us wonder why we sing "For he's a jolly good pharaoh" when the honoree's not even Egyptian. But that's okay -- it adds a little much-needed spice to life. We all make these mistakes, now don't we? We're sure you've got some of your own to share.

If you've always wondered why John Fogerty sang, "There's a bathroom on the right" in that famous Creedence Clearwater Revival song, then this article's for you.

Most of us have our personal tales of myth-heard song lyrics -- and those of us who don't simply won't admit it. Use of language may be one of the defining aspects of humanity, but, well...when it comes to musical stylings, it can sometimes be hard to understand even our nominal mother tongues.

So here's to everyone who's ever wondered why the Weather Girls and Ginger Spice extolled the virtues of Raisonettes (the real lyric: "It's Raining Men"), or why Jimmy Hendrix excused himself while he kissed that guy ("excuse me while I kiss the sky"). And that CCR thing? It's actually "There's a bad moon on the rise."

You may not be able to live for long without drinking water, but you can do just fine without all the myths about drinking water. Here are four, well and truly busted.

Water is life, and perhaps as a result, we suffer from lots of myths about drinking water. That's especially true today, when drinking the proper water is often implicitly associated with beauty, health, and sheer coolness. So, are these associations accurate in any way, shape, or form? Um, do chickens have lips?