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 […]