I'm all for stainless steel straws of the sort that we sell in the Boing Boing Store. They're an environmentally-friendly way to stop yourself from making the idiot-stick move (unless you need to use a straw, due to medical issues, then we're cool) of using one of the 175 million plastic straws that end up in landfills each year. If you opt for a metal straw, fair warning: don't pop it into your drink until you're seated and ready to sit and sip.

From The Boston Globe:

A British woman was impaled by a metal straw after falling at her home, a coroner said in an inquest this week that warned about the dangers of metal straws. Such straws have surged in popularity as cities, states, and even countries have banned single-use plastic straws.

The woman, Elena Struthers-Gardner, 60, who had a disability, fell and sustained a traumatic brain injury in November when the 10-inch straw pierced her eye, according to the coroner’s report.

“As a consequence of the fall, a stainless steel straw that was in a glass Kilner-style cup Mrs. Struthers-Gardner was carrying penetrated her left eye,” the report said.

Sadly, Mrs. Struthers-Gardner, died as a result of her injury.

Now, here's the thing and, don't ask me how I know, but you could very easily do the same thing with an OG plastic straw, so long as one end of the appliance has an air-tight seal. Are the odds as high of a plastic straw will fucking you up like stainless steel can? Read the rest

Classic three-act narrative structure pic.twitter.com/AP4WgdxlN8

— Jack Seale (@jackseale) May 1, 2019

Ah, resolution.

(via Daily Grail) Read the rest

CCTV footage from China’s Jiamusi City. Fortunately the elderly fellow was reportedly unhurt. According to MSNBC, "the road had not been built well after construction last year and the rain was too much for it to bear."

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Motorcyclists are 27x more likely to die and 5x more likely to be injured than folks in passenger cars. RideApart discusses the dangers of motorcycling in a mature and upfront fashion. Read the rest

A spool of cable fell off a truck on Route 40 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, turning the highway into a hyperrealistic video game.

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"Fred, if you're afraid you'll have to overlook it, Besides you knew the job was dangerous when you took it!"

I hadn't seen this in years. Read the rest

Taxonomist Kipling Will tracked a rare beetle through the jungles of the south Pacific ... and almost lost his life in the process. Read the rest

Hippopotamuses — big, lumbery, and related to whales — are described as being "mostly herbivorous". They are also MUCH faster than they look. And they are one of the most aggressive animals you'll ever meet. This combination of traits created an incredibly harrowing experience for river guide Paul Templer. Read the rest

The Canadian government has approved the sale of nosodes — homeopathic alternatives to vaccines. I probably don't have to explain to you all why giving children a sugar pill that works no better than placebo is a bad, bad, bad idea when the diseases you're trying to prevent are things like polio, measles, and rabies. Here's what you can do to help stop this racket. Read the rest

There are 44 prescription drugs on the market today that should never be combined with grapefruit. That's because the sour fruit (and some other, closely related, kinds of citrus) contain chemical compounds called furanocoumarins that prevent your body from metabolizing certain prescription drugs. Essentially, the grapefruit creates an artificial overdose where one tablet packs the power (and side effects) of 20. The CBC has a full list of the drugs, which includes cancer drugs, cholesterol-lowering drugs, and drugs to treat problems of the urinary tract. Wikipedia has more about why this interaction happens. Read the rest

Bacteria living zero-gravity environments become more virulent. People living in zero-gravity environments have less-than-fully-functional immune systems. The result is a danger for space travelers that few of us on Earth ever think about — even though a lot of early astronauts, right up through the Apollo program, suffered severe infections in flight, or shortly after landing. Ed Yong's article for Wired UK from 2011 is a reminder that there's a lot of details that need to be worked out before humanity can become a space-faring species. We've got more worry about up there than just radiation. Read the rest

Last week, Mother Jones published a really fascinating article arguing that the crime wave that swept through America between the 1960s and 1980s can largely be blamed on leaded gasoline — and the subsequent lead poisoning of an entire generation of Americans. For more background on the dangers of leaded gas, I suggest reading this post by Deborah Blum. Essentially, it's an excerpt from her fantastic book, The Poisoner's Handbook. In it, she tells the story of the history of leaded gas — a substance that was known to be dangerous even in the 1920s — and the conspiracy to sweep that danger under the rug. Read the rest

Back in May, we linked you to the reporting of Outside's Grayson Schaffer, who was stationed in the base camps of Mount Everest, watching as the mountain's third deadliest spring in recorded history unfolded. Ten climbers died during April and May. But the question is, why?

From a technological standpoint, as Schaffer points out in a follow up piece, Everest ought to be safer these days. Since 1996 — the mountain's deadliest year, documented in John Krakauer's Into Thin Air — weather forecasts have improved (allowing climbers to avoid storms like the one responsible for many of the 1996 deaths), and new helicopters can reach stranded climbers at higher altitudes. But those things, Schaffer argues, are about reducing deaths related to disasters. This year, he writes, the deaths that happened on Everest weren't about freak occurrences of bad luck. It wasn't storms or avalanches that took those people down. It wasn't, in other words, about the random risks of nature.

This matters because it points to a new status quo on Everest: the routinization of high-altitude death. By and large, the people running the show these days on the south side of Everest—the professional guides, climbing Sherpas, and Nepali officials who control permits—do an excellent job of getting climbers to the top and down again. Indeed, a week after this year’s blowup, another hundred people summited on a single bluebird day, without a single death or serious injury.

But that doesn’t mean Everest is being run rationally. There are no prerequisites for how much experience would-be climbers must have and no rules to say who can be an outfitter.

Here's a trailer for "Line of Sight," a documentary on underground bike-messenger racing that uses helmetcams to capture some pretty insane (and often terrifying) examples of cycling skill:

Line Of Sight is a rare view into underground bicycle messenger racing which has become a global phenomenon. For over a decade Lucas Brunelle has been riding with the fastest, most skilled urban cyclists around the world while capturing all the action with his customized helmet cameras to bring you along for the ride.

This is bike riding like you've never seen before, in gripping first-person perspective through the most hectic city streets, on expressways in Mexico City, over the frozen Charles River, under the Mediterranean Sea, across the Great Wall of China and deep into the jungles of Guatemala.

LINE OF SIGHT - Official Trailer Read the rest