"You would need to create pressure inside the cranium. Even if you could generate pressure by squeezing the outside of the head, once the cranium is breached at the orifice where the eye nerves enter, this pressure would be greatly diminished."
Researcher Tobias Mattei, who has examined how children's bicycle helmets prevent skull crush injuries agrees.
"It would be impossible for even the strongest human to break the skull through compressive forces exerted by any means (either with their hands bilaterally or by stepping [on] it) in any portion of the skull," he told the US paper.
There is an urban legend about a chess player named Nikolai Titov whose head reportedly exploded when he was playing chess.
But a quick fact check shows that this too is a fictional story made up by parody tabloid newspaper Weekly World News in 1994.
- AAP