Worst. Bugs. Ever.

Last month automaker Toyota announced a recall of 160,000 of its Prius hybrid vehicles following reports of vehicle warning lights illuminating for no reason, and cars' gasoline engines stalling unexpectedly. But unlike the large-scale auto recalls of years past, the root of the Prius issue wasn't a hardware problem -- it was a programming error in the smart car's embedded code. The Prius had a software bug.

With that recall, the Pruis joined the ranks of the buggy computer -- a club that began in 1947 when engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark 1 system. The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer's logbook with the words: "first actual case of a bug being found."

Sixty years later, computer bugs are still with us, and show no sign of going extinct. As the line between software and hardware blurs, coding errors are increasingly playing tricks on our daily lives. Bugs don't just inhabit our operating systems and applications -- today they lurk within our cell phones and our pacemakers, our power plants and medical equipment. And now, in our cars.

But which are the worst? Note: a surprising number are fatal, and a few result in earth-shattering kabooms.

Covered in beeees!

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - A South African woman was killed by hundreds of thousands of enraged bees after her vehicle hit an electricity substation that contained their hive, an emergency services group said on Tuesday.

"The car crashed into an electrical substation in Johannesburg which housed a bee hive. It was 10 years old and had in excess of a million bees and they just went wild," said Paul Nel, spokesman for Netcare 911, a private paramedic and ambulance service.

"The people managed to stumble out of the car but they were just overcome by bees," he said. The incident occurred on Monday.

He said the woman died at the scene while her husband was recovering in hospital. Local media reported that the woman was in her early 60s but Nel said he could not confirm her age.

Let the headdesking begin in earnest now

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