Mid-air collision
To be taught whether or not air taxi passengers want fear about collisions with birds, a crash programme in Germany did some checks.
What with the complexity and hazard of getting precise air taxis have congress with precise birds, perfection was out of attain. So the experimenters made do, dropping synthetic “bird projectiles” onto a metallic plate rigged to measure the impression drive.
Aditya Devta and Isabel Metz on the German Aerospace Middle and Sophie Armanini on the Technical College of Munich describe these violent encounters in a preprint article. (Due to reader Mason Porter for alerting us to it.)
This work was, of necessity, a tough step in the direction of reliably answering the large query.
It encountered difficulties, beginning with “inconsistencies and lack of repeatability due to human involvement as the bird projectiles were dropped manually by hand”. Future efforts, the report says, “will eliminate the human involvement [so as to] increase accuracy in force measurements and repeatability”.
Mid-track collision
Talking of birds-and-air-taxis-ish experiments, have you ever heard the one in regards to the moose and the bullet practice? Yong Peng and his colleagues at Central South College in China have begun to look at what would possibly occur when these heavyweights meet at excessive velocity, within the paper “Evaluation of moose movement trajectory after bullet train-moose collisions“.
The query includes greater than the preliminary, easy impression. The scientists point out two not-unlikely issues: “A moose lying on a track after a crash may increase the risk of train derailment” and “a moose thrown into the air during a collision may also hit and damage the pantograph, which prevents a train from running”.
The investigation up to now has been finished with finite-element mathematical simulations and a few not-very-heavyweight experiments. The experiments used contemporary beef – beef from cows, not moose – muscle tissue and a sort of stress-strain testing machine often known as a “split-Hopkinson pressure bar”.
The scientists report that, basically, the impression drive “depends on the contact area between the train and the moose”.
As to these issues: “The moose would be pushed away by the V-shaped locomotive and would not cause a derailment, and the height of the moose thrown into the air cannot reach the height of the pantograph, which would prevent damage to the pantograph of a bullet train.”
The examine means that greater issues are approaching: “only the scenario of a train impacting a moose across a track at a speed of 110 km/h was simulated, which cannot fully reflect the risks of train-moose collisions. Thus, more speeds and postures are needed to enhance our study, which is ongoing.”
Feeling saucy
Slowly, sweetly, new sauce insights pour in from readers. These pertain to the off-label utilization of ketchup and different sticky foodstuffs to make electrocardiogram (ECG) electrodes work nicely (Suggestions, 25 Could).
Brian Reffin Smith provides a musical word: “You don’t need human skin to test whether electrodes work better with ketchup than with official gel. I have a device which applies a low voltage to plant leaves (or anything else) and then translates the varying current into MIDI signals, sent to a computer or synthesiser to trigger sounds… Anyway, statistically insignificant but anecdotally and culinarily interesting tests reveal that a reduced salt ketchup applied between ECG electrodes and a chilli plant’s leaf produced a quite high E, whilst the proper gel on a neighbouring leaf played G. I thought this might help, but now I don’t think so.”
Dave Hardy contributes a practicality declare: “My GP in the early 1970s said that the gel was ridiculously expensive, but strawberry jam worked just as well. I don’t know if he’d experimented with different options or just used what he had to hand. (This was in the Falkland Islands.)”
Star deaths stars
It’s stunning how few persons are hailed as being a “celebrity pathologist”, isn’t it? The Related Press brings information of the loss of life of considered one of them: “Dr. Cyril Wecht, celebrity pathologist who argued more than 1 shooter killed JFK, dies at 93”.
One of many first movie star pathologists, Bernard Spilsbury (1877-1947), helped set up London’s repute because the go-to place for entertainingly intelligent homicide thriller investigations.
The Royal Faculty of Physicians made clear, postmortemly, that Spilsbury’s profession was fairly theatrical: “The famous Crippen trial, on which he worked with [William] Wilcox to show that the murder was due to hyoscine hydrobromide, brought him the first blaze of publicity which he deplored in every succeeding trial at which he appeared, and this was undoubtedly why he assumed an austere and frigid manner to all but his intimate friends.”
Spilsbury’s method was nothing to smell at. One facet of postmortem work – the dreadful stink of decaying useless our bodies – deters delicate folks from coming into the career. Spilsbury wasn’t a delicate individual in that respect. His friends marvelled at what an obituary politely stated was a “defective sense of smell”.
Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the journal Annals of Unbelievable Analysis. Earlier, he labored on uncommon methods to make use of computer systems. His web site is unbelievable.com
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