How Media Brings Out the Idiot in Teens »

«1 of 1»

Is a teenager's propensity for doing really stupid things inevitable, or must that stupidity be coaxed out of him? That's the question asked by neurosurgeons at Case Western University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio.

The research team examined the reckless yet increasingly popular "sport" of car surfing, in which the passenger or sometimes driver opts for the more spacious view on the hood or roof of the car while the car is moving.

Their research, however, turned into something deeper than a typical neurological injury study that merely reports the unsurprising laundry list of head injuries inherent from being tossed from a moving vehicle into a gravel-filled ditch or onto glass-strewn asphalt. They asked why anyone would undertake such risky behavior.

Spikes in car-surfing injuries during the past decade, they found, neatly overlap the release of video games and movies depicting the act. These results appear in the July 2009 issue of Journal of Neurosurgery: Pediatrics.

Seatbelts are for sissies

American high school students were never that good at physics, or car-surfers would first do some back-of-the-envelop calculations. The fastest that a typical kid could run into a wall, should that sound appealing, is about 15 mph. This modest foot-powered collision would hurt, although I admit I cannot cite any study here.

But on the hood of a car and at the moment of the inevitable departure from the aforementioned hood, the surfing passenger is moving at the same speed as the car, typically 25 miles per hour or more.

In their retrospective study, the Case Western researchers found that 100 percent of the car-surfing injuries treated at their hospital, Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital, were cranial injuries such as skull fractures. In comparison, the risk of cranial injury from "normal" car or bike accidents, they found, was about 25 percent.

Read Full Story at livescience.com »

212 Views Share Story 0 Comments Report