Advice Of The Week (7)

I am not a great fan of lightning and prefer to stay indoors during a storm. However, what should you do if you are caught in the great outdoors? Some German scientists, according to Nature, have some come up with some helpful advice: soak your head with rainwater.

While the chances of being struck by lightning are around one in a million, a direct hit to the head is usually fatal. Taking two model “heads” containing three layers representing the scalp, skull, and brain, they sprayed one head with a weak salt solution to represent rainwater and kept the other dry. They then exposed the two heads to ten electrical discharges of 2kA and 12 kV.

The found that the wet head carried a lower amount of the current to the brain layer compared with the dry head, offering a survival rate of 70 to 90% compared with 30% for a dry head. Vapourising water could reduce the temperature of the skin and direct lightning away from it, the believe, but they will conduct more research on their findings.

Instead of rushing for shelter when there is lightning and a downpour, perhaps we should stay in the open and bare our heads. The choice is yours.