Wired has a great article about some high-school kids in Arizona who won an undewater engineering contest.

One difficulty they ran into was a leak in their electronics component housing. It was a small leak, so rather than try to fix it, they went for absorption. What absorbs the best? Tampons!

When Luis lowered Stinky into the water for their run, Lorenzo prayed to the Virgin Mary. He prayed that the tampons would work but then wondered if the Virgin got her period and whether it was appropriate for him to be praying to her about tampons. He tried to think of a different saint to pray to but couldn't come up with an appropriate one. The whir of Stinky's propellers brought him back to the task at hand, extracting a water sample from a submerged container.

Yeah, so the reporter probably made the part about praying up, but the tampons were real!