The Quick and the (not so) Dead

Just when you thought it was UNsafe to go near the beach, scientists come out and debunk the myth of quicksand. Turns out, it's NOT as dangerous as Hollywood says it is.

Everybody thinks, thanks to Hollywood, that you can drown in quicksand. Basically if you do a simple buoyancy calculation, the Archimedes force, it is immediately evident that you can't drown completely," said Daniel Bonn, of the Van der Waals-Zeeman Institute at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Completely?! And here we were taking Hollywood as our authority on quicksand. I mean, Gilligan almost succumbed to it several times. Apparently the professor should've known better.

They also calculated the amount of force necessary to get a trapped foot out -- and found it was the equivalent needed to lift a medium-sized car.

Read as: unless you've got the Skipper pulling you out, you're stuck...forever! there you have it - another myth debunked!