Radiolab

I guess things get swallowed all the time, but this tale (from a hospital case study in Devon, in Britain) tells us something extraordinary about felt-tip pens. (If you look at this woman's stomach, there's a pen in there near the top.)

It's called "An incidental finding of a gastric foreign body 25 years after ingestion," by Oliver Richard Waters, Tawfique Daneshmend, Tarek Shirazi, in BMJ Case Reports from 2011.

Here's the full report:

Here's a question: What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent of the speed of light?

The answer is: Don't.

Not that anyone's going to pitch a ball that fast, but if they do, you definitely don't want to be the batter. Or the pitcher. Or in the stands watching. Or anywhere near the ball field. But, trust me, you very definitely want to see what happens.

One day, the great novelist and essayist G. K. Chesterton decided to go sketching. He brought his colored chalks, his reds, blues, yellows and greens to a hill in South England, but he forgot to bring white. Damn, he thought, what an idiot, to leave out the crucial one. "Without white," he wrote, "my absurd little pictures would be...pointless." What to do? "I sat on the hill in a sort of despair."