Why don’t ice skaters get swollen hands? An hypothesis

If you were to take part in a prolonged inline roller-skate street journey involving the rhythmic swaying and waving of your outstretched arms in a circular arc, you might end up suffering from oedema (a.k.a. edema). As did Doctor Sody Naimer [pictured] of the Department of Emergency Medicine, Neve Dekalim, Goosh Katif, and Ben-Gurion University […]

Bernard Vonnegut, Ice-17, Ice-9, chicken-plucking, and tornadoes

Bernard Vonnegut, that most surprising atmospheric scientist, gets appreciated in an Italian-language essay called “Ice Numbers“, by Franco Bagnoli of the University of Florence, published in Ciencia y Cultura. Here’s a machine translation of bits of Bagnoli’s essay: At the end of 2016, at the Institute of Complex Systems of the CNR in Florence, Italy, a new […]

Vibrostimulating the Latvian bobsleighers can produce victory (study)

With the Winter Olympics about to begin, what better time to ask, ‘Do Latvian bobsleighers have a unique advantage? Specifically, the RE21 from the Latvian Academy of Sport Education? [photo at right] Details were revealed in a 2011 paper for the LASE JOURNAL OF SPORT SCIENCE 2011/2/1 | 3 by Uģis Ciematnieks, Nauris Ķeizans, Sandis […]

Curling brush research (studies of Olympian sports technology)

With the curling competitions at the 2014 Winter Olympics about to get underway, what better time to look at the work of Brett A. Marmo, Mark-Paul Buckingham, and Jane R. Blackford of the School of Engineering & Electronics and the Centre for Materials Science & Engineering, at The University of Edinburgh, UK, who have performed […]

Ice music and ice cream music, and a former rodeo rider

Ice cream and ice can be used as, or as part of, musical instruments. Here are two instances. This patent concerns an invention in the field known (in a phrase auto-translated from the original Chinese into English) as “cartoon belt music ice cream”: “Cartoon music ice cream,” Chinese patent application 2476961 Y, filed May 16, […]