Britain continues to be fascinated with parachute jump failure. Here are two examples, one new, one old: “How to survive a parachute failure“—BBC News, 2018. and “Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials” —British Medical Journal, 2003. (Thanks to IanVisits for bringing the new […]
Tag: parachute
The Parachuting Rag-Doll Experiment
Falling from a great height with a parachute is likely to result in lesser injury than falling from a great height without a parachute, suggests a newly published German medical study. The study is: “Does usage of a parachute in contrast to free fall prevent major trauma?: a prospective randomised-controlled trial in rag dolls,” Patrick […]
Transplanting Beavers by Airplane and Parachute
Perhaps the first formal study of transplanting beavers by airplane and parachute appeared slightly more than six decades ago: “Transplanting Beavers by Airplane and Parachute,” Elmo W. Heter, Journal of Wildlife Management, vol. 14, no. 2, April 1950, pp. 143-7. The Atlantic did a nice piece about it, as did The Daily Planet. The author, at the Idaho […]
The tale of the whale and the parachute
Potvin ([seen here] with an accelerometer on his head) has been helping the biologists build a sophisticated physical model of a feeding fin whale. They set out to build a model that would produce the kinds of behavior that real whales do. For example, a fin whale will dive hundreds of feet down in search […]
Paper or Plastic? Plummeting Dead Mice
If you’re going to lace dead mice with poison, and drop them from helicopters into a rainforest in Guam in such a way that they become entangled high in the trees where they might murder the brown tree snakes, but you want to avoid (as much as possible) having the toxically tasty mouse corpses fall […]