Tom Lehrer's spring isn't complete without poisoning them in the park; Dick Dastardly dratted and double-dratted himself to near-oblivion chasing one. For the rest of us, it's become all too easy to vilify them as "rats with wings".

We carried a selection and you responded in kind - here are our favourite 25

The horse is part owned by Sir Alex Ferguson

Top trainer suffering a Group One drought hopes Oaks fancy can shine in York rehearsal

Euler is known for his work in fluid dynamics, optics and astronomy

The 'discovery' of the Higgs boson is a great event – but an anticlimax for lovers of the chase

Who knew that Apple – the technology firm, not the record label – had its very own fifth Beatle? The Stu Sutcliffe to Steve Jobs's Lennon and Steve Wozniak's McCartney is Ronald Wayne, now 78 and living alone in a bungalow in Nevada from where he supplements his social security payments by selling stamps and old coins.

Almost one million school children aged five to 16 think rapper Professor Green is a scientist, according to research.

Scientist's appearance at opening ceremony took months of careful choreography

The Paralympics opening ceremony made an admirable effort not to sentimentalise disability

The 'Girl in a Blue Dress' author turns her attention from Dickens to Lewis Carroll, and treads carefully but deliberately into 'Lolita' territory

The curiousness of the dark in the night time

Modern publishing history abounds with "adult" writers who try their hand at books for younger readers, right across the spectrum from Salman Rushdie to Katie Price. Traffic in the other direction is far more risky and irregular.

Who invented the computer? This turns out to be a far more complicated question than you might imagine. There is no doubt that it was mathematicians who first conceived of a universally programmable machine, but which mathematicians?