NASA -- Contributing More to Humanity Everyday

American ingenuity at its best...

They call it the GloThong.

For $49.95 you get a thong that lights up the derriere and almost everything around it for at least two hours. It's water-resistant and comes with a battery wall adapter, or you can buy a car charger similar to those used for cell phones.

You laugh. So did I.

What makes it even more outrageous is that GloThong is the idea of Beau Carpenter, who works at NASA and is an MBA student at Rice University. The avid runner had wanted to create luminescent jogging apparel, but he got sidetracked after finding a slew of thongs on the Internet. "Why not make a thong that glows in the dark?" he thought.

So Carpenter rounded up his posse -- fellow Rice cohorts Chris Harris, an electrical engineering student, and Marcus Brocato, a chemistry lab manager who works with Nobel Prize winner Richard Smalley -- to develop GloThong.

Geeks gone wild? Not really. According to Carpenter, they are just guys trying to make a buck off thongs.

"Being guys, it didn't take us long to gravitate to them," says Carpenter, who gets a laugh every time he mentions the product. "My co-workers find it endlessly entertaining."

The men believe their invention is a hot twist on a fashion classic and hope to develop bras, swimsuits, scuba gear and maybe even dog collars.

To test out GloThong, they took their product to a Dickinson topless bar. "The women liked the product so much that they lined up to give us their real names and cell numbers," Carpenter said.

(hat tip: Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback)

Not only are these guys brilliant entrepreneurs, they're going to be able to deduct the trip to the strip club as a business expense.