Better living through science?
Greased Lightning
If you’re planning on joining the Snowsports society, who offer trips to indoor skiing sites here in the UK and at least one to a continental resort in the winter, you may be interested in a new device developed by Wildfire Snowstorm Limited, a spin-off from the University of Sheffield.
At the heart of the device, which can also be fitted to snowboards, lies a reservoir located between the front of the skier’s boot and the ski itself. The natural motion of the skier acts as a pump, pushing an optimum quantity of a special environmentally-friendly lubricant from the reservoir, along a series of pipes and valves to the underside of the ski. This continuous layer of fresh lubrication means skiers equipped with this system can complete a run 1-2% faster than when using conventional skis, as the latter lose their pre-applied layer of wax over the course of the descent. This is a significant improvement for competitive skiers, especially as the device complies with International Ski Federation Rules, and heralds a bright future for Wildfire – they’re due to start testing it with a major global ski manufacturer in December.
Which may be a little late for your trip this year, but may be no bad thing for those of you fresh to skiing. Exhilarating though speed may be, halfway down a black run, cheeks flapping in the wind, you may be rather glad of a lower limit to your terminal velocity; a term may strike you as being all too appropriate…
A head for figures
Meanwhile, those of you who’ll be signing up for the football teams will be glad to hear of new research recently published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Provided of course that you balance your playing time with actual study, they’ve shown an indulgence in the beautiful game won’t see Imperial showing you the red card.
To be more specific, researchers led by Henrik Zetterberg, an associate professor of neurochemistry at the Sahlgrenska Academy, have found that heading the ball does not appear to cause brain damage. Previous studies, looking for direct evidence, had been inconclusive on this point. Zetterberg’s team took a different approach, monitoring neurochemical markers in spinal fluid instead – a previous study on boxers had shown the presence of these markers was linked to brain damage.
Looking for the markers in a study on 20 amateur football players, Zetterberg’s team found no difference between players who headed what were effectively balls from corners 10 or 20 times, nor between the players who headed and a control group who didn’t.
Zetterberg concluded that as an average match contains far fewer headshots, heading the ball is not dangerous, and he attributes the difference with boxing to the lower kinetic energy of impacts with footballs, and a greater ability to stabilise the head. Which may mean explanations for [insert name of preferred footballer with limited mental ability] may need to be revised.
Rocket Science
Fancy yourself as a hot shot in the most fanciful realms of theoretical physics? Watched Scotty at work and thought “No! You’re doing it all wrong you fool!”? If you can answer yes to either of these questions, get cracking: the British Interplanetary Society (www.bis-spaceflight.com) is calling for abstract submissions for a symposium, entitled “Warp Drive, Faster Than Light: Breaking the Interstellar Distance Barrier”. Held on the 15th of November, this symposium will discuss the current state of warp drive research.
Unbeknownst to this author, this technology has advanced from our television screens to our laboratories (well, almost): a seminal 1994 paper by Miguel Alcubierre apparently showed general relativity permits the creation of a space-time “warp bubble”, whose interior, as well as any spacecraft within it, would move faster than the speed of light. This seems to have sparked interest in the academic community, as demonstrated by around 50 publications, some of which have suggested (as one would expect) that there are significant technical obstacles to such a proposal.
Leaving questions of whether she can or cannae take much more aside, the crux of the problem appears to be that unrealistic quantities of negative energy are required to provide sufficient warpage. If you know what this means, doubtless you’ll already be aware that several people are already booked to talk at the symposium, including Remo Garattini of Bergamo University on the subject of “Casimir Energy: A Fuel for Traversable Wormholes”. And you’ve probably already written your abstract, far in advance of the 28th of September submission deadline. If contributing anything is a little beyond you, but you want to attend, have a look at the website: a quick glance suggests that it costs £23.50 for students.
