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Sean Nash

Race car drivers tend to blink at the same places in each lap - 2 views

  • The world goes dark for about one-fifth of a second every time you blink, a fraction of an instant that’s hardly noticeable to most people. But for a Formula One race car driver traveling up to 354 kilometers per hour, that one-fifth means almost 20 meters of lost vision
  • People are often thought to blink at random intervals, but researchers found that wasn’t the case for three Formula drivers.
  • the drivers tended to blink at the same parts of the course during each lap, cognitive neuroscientist Ryota Nishizono and colleagues report in the May 19 iScience
    • Sean Nash
       
      Interesting. So, do we do the same thing while driving around town? Could you design a method to record eye blinks as people drive known routes around town? We could simultaneously use the Arduino Science Journal app on the iPhone to also correlate physical data in a moving car like acceleration/deceleration, motion in X, Y, Z directions, etc. I wonder if we could find a correlation in everyday driving that could help from a safety perspective?
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  • He was surprised to find almost no literature on blinking behavior in active humans even though under extreme conditions like motor racing or cycling
    • Sean Nash
       
      Ok.... this screams "potential research idea."
  • Nishizono and colleagues mounted eye trackers on the helmets of three drivers and had them drive three Formula circuits
  • Where the drivers blinked was surprisingly predictable, the team found. The drivers had a shared pattern of blinking that had a strong connection with acceleration, such that drivers tended not to blink while changing speed or direction — like while on a curve in the track — but did blink while on relatively safer straightaways.
    • Sean Nash
       
      What sort of implications does this have for driving in key, known, busy interchanges in KC? Could we potentially provide data to show certain stretches of highway need more signage, etc? That could have civil engineering implications.
  • “We think of blinking as this nothing behavior,” he says, “but it’s not just wiping the eyes. Blinking is a part of our visual system.”
  • Nishizono next wants to explore what processes in the brain allow or inhibit blinking in a given moment, he says, and is also interested in how blinking behavior varies among the general population.
    • Sean Nash
       
      While the "brain" part might move beyond our feasibility, the potential of finding real correlations to driving patterns or routes is a completely different spin-off and one that could have really practical suggestive applications for city planners, etc.
Caleb Jasper

Your car may be giving you cancer, warns study - 0 views

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    Thought this was interesting.
Sean Nash

Traffic speeds decrease when bike lane is present | ScienceDaily - 0 views

  • Researchers conducting a study at a high-traffic intersection in a Jersey Shore town have found that the installation of a bike lane along the road approaching the convergence reduced driving speeds.
  • "We are giving you more evidence that bike lanes save lives,"
  • The research team started by creating a temporary bike lane on Cookman and Asbury Avenues on the side of the road heading toward the beach, delineating it with orange road cones.
    • Sean Nash
       
      Though you COULD NOT do something this manipulative, you COULD contact municipalities nearby and inquire about current and near-future efforts to install bike lanes... and THEN collect pre-and most traffic data in real-time. This would be quite feasible and super interesting. It would be all about doing the legwork to find where these design changes are being made, and of course the timing of it all.
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  • They found that the presence of the delineated bike lane made a difference: a 28 percent reduction in average maximum speeds and a 21 percent decrease in average speeds for vehicles turning right.
  • In addition, drivers moving at a perpendicular angle to the bike lane did not slow down.
  • With pedestrian deaths rising nationally, a study such as this could contribute to the development of new traffic policies or the reversal of older ones, Younes said.
Sean Nash

New fabric cools people in sweltering cities - 0 views

  • researchers have designed a new wearable fabric to help people beat the heat in urban settings. The material, reported in the journal Science, could find use in clothing, cooling facades for buildings and cars, and for food storage and transport.
  • Existing cooling fabrics reflect sunlight and also wick away sweat to cool a person via evaporation. More recently, researchers have designed cooling fabrics that rely on the principle of radiative cooling: the natural phenomenon in which objects radiate heat through the atmosphere straight into outer space.
  • But radiative cooling fabrics made so far are designed to work when laid horizontally as opposed to vertically, as they would be when worn.
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  • researchers at the University of Chicago made a new three-layer fabric. Its wool bottom layer wicks heat from the skin to the middle layer, which is made of silver nanowires that block heat from coming in. The top layer selectively emits heat into the atmosphere.
  • In tests conducted in the urban heat island of Chicago and under blistering Arizona sun, the material stayed 2.3°C cooler than sports cooling fabrics and 8.9°C cooler than commercial silk used for summer clothing.
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    Materials science is certainly a nifty bit of engineering. This is the second time I've seen this study mentioned. Look interesting enough to dig into various materials and how they might be combined to serve a key purpose?
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