May 6th 2009 By Matt Glazebrook

8 Common Ways Sh*t Happens and How You Can Prevent It

Murphy's Law isn't one of the 18 basic physical principles that govern the universe. That didn't stop Peter J. Bentley from writing "Why Sh*t Happens: The Science of a Really Bad Day," a book that takes scientific rationale to investigate why everything that could go wrong is going wrong.

We recently quizzed the University College London professor on a few of the everyday bugbears discussed in his pop-science tome, and asked him for all-important tips on avoiding them. Basically, for those of you prone to fecal occurrences, this advice can save you some serious sh*t.
Sleeping through your alarm

Cause: We develop tolerances to sounds just as we develop tolerances to smells or sights. (If you wear glasses, you don't really see the frames after a while.) So if you have an alarm clock that makes the same noise every morning, eventually you will stop noticing it, and if you've had a late night and not enough sleep, you may just sleep right through.
Solution: Get an alarm clock that makes different noises each morning or jumps and rattles. Another solution is what your mother may have told you -- have a regular routine, go to bed at a sensible time, give yourself plenty of sleep, and you'll wake up at the right time.

After the jump, get solutions for everything from being really lost to having gum stuck in your hair.

Cutting yourself while shaving

Cause: We can't always prevent razor nicks, but stopping the bleeding is another matter.
Solution: Our blood contains little cells called platelets that glue themselves together when they come into contact with the air. They plug the hole, forming a clot that hardens into a scab, protecting you from all the nasty bacteria and viruses doing their best to make a home inside you. If you keep wiping the cut or if you attach a piece of tissue to your face and then pull it off later, you're undoing the work of these platelets. Best to leave it alone, or just press on it lightly for a few minutes to let the platelets seal up the nick from the inside and then let your skin do its thing.

Getting your MP3 player wet
Cause: You drop it in water. Hopefully, not while you're going to the bathroom.
Solution: If your electronic gadget has explored new underwater worlds, the first thing you should do is take out the batteries and dry everything off. If the batteries have leaked inside, then carefully clean everything. Do not attempt to charge it, power it from an adapter or use it at all, until it is completely dry. Then, when all is dry again, when you insert a new battery and press the 'on' button, your gadget might just work again.

Amazing Feats of Survival

Mountain biker Petra Davis, 16, recently survived a bear attack in Alaska during a bike race. She suffered a punctured lung, broken ribs, gashes on her legs and a rupture of her carotid artery. Miraculously, her coach found her and the quick work of EMTs and surgeons was able to save her life.

msnbc.com

Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashed into the side of the Andes mountains carrying 45 people on their way to a rugby match. This is well-known story because the survivors were forced to resort to the extreme measure of cannibalism. All told, 16 people lasted the 72-day ordeal.

Mario Cavalli, Wikipedia

Hiking alone in the remote Utah mountains, Aron Ralston's right forearm was pinned under a boulder. After five days of trying to shake himself free and drinking his own urine as sustenance, Ralston realized he had to amputate or die. He performed the harrowing feat with a small utility knife.

Gretel Daugherty, Getty Images

Roy Sullivan, a U.S. park ranger, was struck by lightning on seven different occasions and lived to tell about them all. The odds of an individual suffering seven lighting strikes is about one in sixteen-septillion (24 zeros.)

In 1823, frontiersman Hugh Glass was mauled by a grizzly bear he managed to kill. Thinking he had died, and fearful of Indian attacks, Glass's companions left him. But Glass woke up, let maggots eat the flesh of his busted leg and spent the next six weeks crawling 200 miles to the nearest settlement.

Alexander Nemenova, AFP / Getty Images

The sole survivor of an airplane explosion at 33,333 feet (6.3 miles), Vesna Vulovic holds the world record for the highest fall without a parachute. While she was initially paralyzed from the waist down from her injuries, she regained her ability to walk in less than a year.

Anyone can claim they were struck by lightning, but William Hall can prove it. He was pumping gas in front of an upstate New York convenience store when a bolt of lightning knocked him out cold for five minutes. The whole scene was caught on a security camera.

youtube.com

Joe Simpson and Simon Yates were the first to scale the west peak of the Siula Grande. Disaster struck on the way down, and Yates was forced to let a badly wounded Simpson drop 100 feet into an ice crevasse. Simpson survived the fall and spent three days crawling back to base camp.

Getty Images

Railroad switchman Truman Duncan fell off the front of a moving train car. He was swept underneath and cut in two. Despite losing both legs and a kidney, Duncan called the paramedics on his cell phone, survived a 45-minute wait, and then persevered through 23 surgeries.

youtube.com

French Trekkers Loic Pillois and Guilhem Nayral spent 72 days lost in the Amazon. They subsisted on spiders and bugs -- which they attracted with their own excrement. Nayral eventually fell ill after eating a tarantula, but luckily, Pillois broke through to civilization the next day.

Jody Amieta, AFP / Getty Images

Forgetting Stuff
Cause: Most people can't hold more than four or five things in the short-term memory. Get a little distracted and it's all too easy to forget something important.
Solution: We remember what's important or interesting to us. So if you need to remember some boring list or a series of numbers, you can make it interesting by using tricks, like mnemonics. Or you might learn to associate numbers and symbols with familiar objects in your life and then make up a story. For example, if '1' is banana, '2' is a pair of shoes, '3' is Tricksy the cat, and the number was 322133, then the story could be: Tricksy (3) chewed one pair of shoes (2), peed in another pair (2), slipped on a banana skin (1) and came face to face with himself in the mirror (33). Remember the story and you've remembered the number.

Getting chewing gum in your hair

Cause: Gum has its stretchy property because of the composition of its main ingredient: latex. Whether man-made, or oozing from a cut in a tree, latex is a mixture of water and polymer molecules. A polymer is a long string of smaller molecules called monomers, all chained together in a long molecular conga line. So when the loopy gum molecules meet the rough hair fibers the result is like Velcro.
Solution: Alter the physical properties. Either turn gum into a solid by placing ice next to it and smashing it away, or liquefy it by massaging an oil into the mixture until it dissolves.

Getting lost
Cause: You've entered a location with which you're not familiar.
Solution: Copy migratory creatures -- learn landmarks along the route so that you'll be able to find your way back. Consciously point out unusual buildings or trees. Try to understand the general direction you need to be heading, either from signs, the shadows cast by the sun, or even a compass in your cell phone. Remember, you have a brain considerably bigger than the peanut-size brain of a salmon, or the grain-of-rice-size brain of a bee. Also, if you're really lost, think about asking for directions.

Getting your finger stuck

Cause: It's hard to go through your life without accidentally getting a finger stuck in a bottle, ring, CD, etc. The anatomy of our fingers causes the problems. You have friction-ridge skin that grips at the bottom and knobbly skin over the knuckle to get wedged. You have bony joints. You also have blood vessels that can dilate or contract. If you're warm or you bruise the finger, more blood will be pushed into it, and the finger will swell up, making it impossible to extract.
Solution: Obtain something that will act like a lubricant -- soap, oil, shampoo -- and carefully work it around the finger. Second, be calm, obtain some ice and place it on the finger to fool your body into contracting the blood vessels. Raising the hand high will also drain it of extra fluid. Then slowly rotate the finger round left and right, and ease it out gently without hurting yourself.

Having a leaky pen

Cause: Keep a pen in a pocket and the fluff and grit may find its way onto the ball of the pen. It only takes the smallest speck of dirt to become wedged between the pen and the ball for the seal to be broken and for ink to leak out.
Solution: You need to keep the tip of the pen clean and dry, and only write on clean and dry surfaces. But even if your pen leaks, don't worry -- the ink is designed to wash out without problems.