Don't Stand By Me - Surviving a lightning strike. By Joshua Foer: "Unlike garden-variety electrical shock, which finds the quickest route directly through the body, lightning can flash over the outside of a victim, sometimes blowing off clothes without leaving so much as a mark on the skin. The high-voltage electricity that zips through the body does its damage in just a few milliseconds. In many cases, there are no visible burns, though temporary fernlike bruises called Lichtenberg figures sometimes appear. Medical tests like MRIs, CT scans, and X-rays usually come back normal. But those are anatomical tests of how the body looks, not functional tests of how it works, and they can be deceiving. Zap a computer with an electrical surge and its hardware will appear unchanged, but that doesn't mean it'll still be able to run Leisure Suit Larry. The same is true of humans."



Stolen from Boing Boing.