The title of this study (though not quite so much the text of it) suggests that some psychology insights might be gained by doing particle collision experiments — experiments analogous to what some physics researchers do: “How Do Narcissistic Employees Respond to Abusive Supervision: Two Roles of Narcissism in Decreasing Perception and Increasing Deviance,” Rong Wang and […]
Tag: collision
Collision Detection: Bees versus Fish (by Ig Nobel Prize winners)
Ig Nobel Prize winners Marie Dacke and Emily Baird are now exploring how how bees collide or don’t is different from how fish collide or don’t. They and their colleagues have just published a study of the matter. The 2013 Ig Nobel Prize jointly in the fields of biology and astronomy was awarded to Marie Dacke, Emily […]
How to intriguingly begin a story about a collision
This medical paper demonstrates how to intrigue the reader right away, in the first two sentences: “Fracture penis: a case more heard about than seen in general surgical practice,” Manash Ranjan Sahoo, Anil Kumar Nayak, Tapan Kumar Nayak, Anand S, BMJ Case Reports, 2013.The authors, at SCB Medical College, Cuttack, Odisha, India, begin their report […]
How do pedestrians avoid collisions?
As you walk city streets, frustrated at why those other pedestrians behave so frustratingly, be aware that scientists are trying to improve the situation, but are making progress only in slow steps. Dr Taku Fujiyama [pictured here, receiving an award], one of the modern masters in this endeavour, is a lecturer at University College London’s Secret […]
Tidy Swiss garbage collector up, up in the sky
Just as certain computer scientists and engineers dream of doing better garbage collection in computers (for a dream come true, see Microsoft’s “Fundamentals of Garbage Collection“), scientists and engineers at Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne dream of doing better garbage collection in space. Dead satellites. Detritus from collisions between now-dead satellites and whatever slammed into them. Junk that […]
Invention of the day: Collision-protection for motorcyclists
This Vietnamese news report shows a new invention: a system of armor intended to protect a motorcycle rider in the event of a collision. The video appears to demonstrate that the invention works well for collision speeds of less than one mile-per-hour.
Railway-collision ejection-capsule
In case two trains were about to collide head-on, this emergency ejection capsule would allow at least one person, likely the train engineer, to escape. The scheme was described in a magazine article in 1915. The blog Technologia Obsoleta spotlighted it recently. BONUS: An alternate solution, devised by Flann O’Brien
Head-on train collision: A solution
Flann O’Brien devised a way to minimize the damage that results when trains collide head-on. This diagram, with an accompanying explanation, is reprinted in the book The Best of Myles (it originally appeared in The Irish Times):