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A teenage driver has crashed into another car after pulling her hat over her eyes as part of the so-called "Bird Box Challenge". The 17-year-old was (unsuccessfully) trying to emulate characters from Bird Box, a Sandra Bullock movie where characters are forced to blindfold themselves to escape an apocalypse caused by supernatural beings. Characters who look at the film's villains are driven mad and eventually kill themselves after suffering visions that urge them to die. The unlikely craze saw Netflix warn the public not to copy the characters and embark on the challenge. Nonetheless, countless videos of people trying to do things while blindfolded have been circulated online - with some reckless motorists covering their eyes while behind the wheel.

For years we have known that the black and whites stripes on a zebra's body were a vital deterrent to horseflies. But scientists think that the stripes may also protect humans from the blood-sucking insects. Many of the indigenous tribes in Africa, Australia and Papua New Guinea who paint stripes on their bodies also live in places where horseflies are widespread. The stripes are for decoration, emotional expression or as markers of identity or group affiliation but maybe they also know something about repelling insects that the rest of the world did not. Scientists in Hungary set out to prove the theory using plastic mannequins covered in glue. The models were coloured brown or beige to mimic dark and fair skin and were then left in a horsefly-infested meadow. They counted the number of horseflies stuck in the glue on each mannequin and, no matter what colour "skin" the model had, the striped ones attracted fewer horseflies. The brown model attracted 10 times as many horseflies as the white-striped one. The beige model got twice as many horseflies as the striped brown model. Models lying down reflected polarised light, which attracts horseflies seeking water, while the models standing up mimicked dark objects which attract female horseflies looking for food. Writing in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the researchers said: "The results of our field experiment support the theory that the use of striped body painting may be related to protection against dangerous parasitic pests.