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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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If you have a car accident and are taken to the hospital, you’re less likely to die if you’ve been drinking (as long as you weren’t drinking so much that it CAUSED the accident!) It turns out that injured patients are less likely to die in the hospital if they have alcohol in their blood, and the more alcohol, the more likely they were to survive.

Injury epidemiologist Lee Friedman says, "This study is not encouraging people to drink. However, after an injury, if you are intoxicated there seems to be a pretty substantial protective effect."
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Engineers are working on a car that drives itself, but what may come first is a car that doesn’t let YOU drive when you’ve had too much to drink.

In 1982, about 49% of drivers killed in car wrecks had blood-alcohol levels of 0.08 or higher. By 1994, that percentage had dropped to about 33%, where it has stayed ever since.

The solution? Develop a car with a breathalyzer in the dashboard sot you have to breathe into it before the car will start (thus designated drivers will become "designated puffers," whose breath contains no alcohol. Alas, this may still allow the inebriated driver to actually drive).
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