How can you protect yourself against a tornado? Two different medical groups suggest that you might try putting a safety helmet on your head, because that might be better than not putting a safety helmet on your head, maybe. Early this year came the treatise: “Safety Helmets: A Practical, Inexpensive Solution for Reducing the Risk […]
Tag: helmet
Hair Pulling: Cured by a Motor Cycle Helmet
This week’s Novel Cure of the Week is described in a study published in 1979: “Nursing care study. Hair Pulling: Cured by a Motor Cycle Helmet,” A. May, Nursing Mirror, 1979 Jun 7;148(23):37-8. We do not have access to that journal, and would likely enjoy seeing a copy of the article. [UPDATE April 3: Kurt […]
Interview with Distracted-Driving Pioneer Senders
John Senders, whose daringly careful experiments during the 1960s earned him an Ig Nobel Prize in safety engineering, in 2011, has had lots of time to think about is work and its implications. Carolyn Johnson interviews him in today’s Boston Globe ideas section. Here’s part of that: Distracted driving, 1962 edition Long before cell phones, […]
Argument for a stinky bicycle helmet
Research News reports on a technical innovation (thanks to investigator Jan Stradowski for bringing this to our attention): Crash helmet with a useful smell The polymer materials or plastics produced by the process start to smell if they develop small cracks. Large cracks really cause a stink. The smell comes from odoriferous oils enclosed in […]
Driving while blinding self with helmet
This video shows a man driving an automobile down a major highway while a helmet repeatedly flaps shut, blinding him. It documents the experiment described in “The attentional demand of automobile driving” [Senders, J. W., Kristofferson, A. B., Levison, W. H., Dietrich, C. W., & Ward, J. L., Highway Research Record, vol. 195, 1967, pp. […]
Helmets make you bicycle faster
Marcel Goverde’s study “Helmets Make You Bicycle Faster” appears in AIR 15-5 (which you can read online). Goverde, who is based at the University of Basel, Switzerland, describes the big question and how he tackled it: There seems to be a lack of profound, scientific studies investigating the risk compensation theory for helmet wearing cyclists. […]