Q. What happens if you drive a partially camouflaged Ford F-250 truck (travelling at 60 km/h [≈ 37 mph]) towards a group of feeding turkey vultures? A. They get out of the way [pdq]. This was one of the findings of an experimental study by Travis L. DeVault, Bradley F. Blackwell, Thomas W. Seamans, Steven […]
Tag: flight
Simulated High-Altitude Taste Testing of Tomato Juice
The taste of tomato juice has been tested at high levels —or, rather, at simulated high levels. This study contains details about that: “Odor and taste perception at normal and low atmospheric pressure in a simulated aircraft cabin,” Andrea Burdack-Freitag, Dino Bullinger, Florian Mayer, Klaus Breuer, Journal für Verbraucherschutz und Lebensmittelsicherheit, March 2011, Volume 6, […]
Robots and humans interact – part 3 of 3
Improbable’s final (previous here) look at the RO-MAN Workshop 2012. – the 21st IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, which was held September 9-13, Paris, France. Part 3 : Floating-in-the-air ‘bot ‘Humanoid’ robots go back a long way, and nowadays there are numerous flying robots in the skies, but there are very […]
Pyramids can fly, under certain circumstances
Pyramids can fly, under certain circumstances. This new study explains: “Intrinsic Stability of a Body Hovering in an Oscillating Airflow,” Bin Liu, Leif Ristroph, Annie Weathers, Stephen Childress, and Jun Zhang, Physical Review Letters, 108, 068103 (2012). The authors, at New York University, explain that in their experimental setup [pictured below]: “weight support and orientational […]