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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.

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!

"Myth-quotations" are more common than most folks realize, due as much to fallible human memory as to bad pronunciation. A few months back, we told you the truth about five famous misquotations; here's the story on five more.

"Myth-quotations" are inevitable in a Tower-of-Babel world like ours. Even in societies with a common language, you can't count on a message being passed from one well-meaning person to another without it getting garbled. Add the uncertainties of memory, and the trouble mounts.

If you feel like "somebody set us up the bomb"* by the time word trickles down to you, you're not alone. Here are five cases of well-known quotes from popular media that just ain't so -- including one from the most popular book of all time, the Christian Bible.

Ready to bust a few more myths about dogs? Well, take a gander at Part II of our doggie myth article.

The fact that there are so many myths about dogs seems more than a little ironic. After all, we've been boon companions since some enterprising caveman tempted a prehistoric wolf into partnership thousands of years ago. You'd think that by now, we'd have put some of these myths to rest.

Of course, we're talking about a species (us) that's bred dogs into an incredible number of varieties, and goes to ridiculous lengths to keep those breeds "pure" -- so maybe we're too busy doing other things to bother cleaning up those myths. Be that as it may, here's the truth about a few more to keep you occupied.

Groucho Marx once said, "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." That's true, but here are a few myths about dogs that aren't, exactly.

While there aren't nearly as many odd myths about dogs as there are about their feline counterparts, we humans still entertain plenty of misconceptions about our erstwhile best friends. In this Very Special two-part episode of Mythbusters, we'll take a look at seven of the most common.

As with cats, some of the items we'll examine here are honest misconceptions that seem plausible, at least. Others, well...let's just say that the best thing you can say about them is that they're superstitions.

Join us for more myths about cats, in Part II of our feline edition of Mythbusters.

Some myths about cats are sillier than others, and we're sure you've heard some whoppers in your time. Now, it's understandable to think cats always land on their feet, or milk's good for them; we have experimental evidence for that, no matter how incomplete or misguided it may be.

But what about some of those really off-the-wall silly legends we hear about cats? Some of them are so improbable that it's hard to understand how they got going in the first place. Well, in this second part of our article on cat myths, we'll tackle of few of the sillier concepts about our feline companions.

Our cultural folklore is chockfull of myths about cats, and in this two-part article, we'll explore eight of them -- four at a time.

Myths about cats are surprisingly common in our culture, despite -- or perhaps because -- of the fact that cats have been our boon companions for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians revered cats, for example, and even had a cat-headed god named Bast (now there's a myth for you).

It's been at least 4,000 years since the Egyptians domesticated cats to control vermin, and there are indications that cats lived alongside humans as early as 10,000 years ago in Cyprus. But the myths still persist, some of them pretty odd. Well, in this exciting episode, cats and kittens, we'll do away with four silly ones.

Even if you don't like spiders and snakes, you'll probably be happy to learn that these snake myths are just so much hooey.

Snake myths are many and varied. Why? Well, if there's one type of beast almost all of us have an aversion to, it's snakes. Oh, sure, you can learn to get over your fear of the slithery critters. But if you're like most people, your initial reaction to the sight of a wild one is to find yourself several dozen feet away. Instantly.

But let's be fair: it's not altogether reasonable to malign these quiet creatures, most of whom are not venomous, and all of whom serve completely respectable purposes in the natural order of things. In this article, we'll do our part to calm the anti-snake storm with the anodyne of truth.