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The force of a champagne cork can shatter glass–and it can also seriously injure your eye.

Warm bottles of champagne and improper cork-removal techniques cause serious, potentially blinding eye injuries each year. Champagne bottles contain pressure as high as 90 pounds per square inch–more than the pressure found inside a typical car tire. This pressure can launch a champagne cork at 50 miles per hour as it leaves the bottle.

Champagne cork mishaps can lead to a variety of serious eye injuries, including rupture of the eye wall, acute glaucoma, retinal detachment, ocular bleeding, dislocation of the lens, and damage to the eye’s bone structure. These injuries sometimes require urgent eye surgeries, and can even lead to blindness in the affected eye. read more

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When we’re searching for simply-styled, low-cost furniture, fixtures and accessories, many of us head for Ikea. But there’s something most of us don’t know: This Swedish company originally used East German prisoners who were incarcerated for their political beliefs, to create these products.

In the November 16th edition of the Guardian, Kate Connolly reports that "a roomful of angry former GDR prisoners first watched–and then started to vent decades worth of anger–as a squirming (Ikea CEO) Peter Betzel formally apologized for using prison labor in the 1970s and 1980s."
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We may not be able to manipulate the speed of light, but by tinkering with the neural connections that indicate its passage in our brains, we may be able to alter the speed of time–or at least with how fast the human brain PERCEIVES it to be. New research suggests timekeeping in the brain is decentralized, with different neural circuits having their own timing mechanisms for specific activities.

This explains why, under certain conditions, the subjective sense of how much time has passed feels different. For instance,. time seems to drag slowly when we’re taking a test and to speed by when we’re having fun.
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