Pop Science Report

Bernie Gonzalez
Mountain Biking / Downhilling
Think back to childhood and that nervous—even scared—feeling you had in your stomach before bombing a steep hill on your
bike. Crank that feeling to 11,000 and you still won’t match the insanity of big mountain freeriding. The biggest event in the
sport is Red Bull Rampage, an annual competition in which the best riders in the world head to Utah to literally huck
themselves off cliffs.

How do these riders—and their bikes—survive such brutal impacts? A lot of it has to do with the skill of the pilots and their
ability to land smoothly after jumping a canyon. But, the bikes still take a beating; it requires a lot of engineering and rugged
materials to withstand that kind of punishment. You can, however, walk into a high-end bike shop and almost all the
components—except for the total lack of fear—right now.

Sam Hill
Graffiti
Cops tracking gang activity frequently need to decipher graffiti, decoding messages, identifying
gangs and even monitoring individual people by looking at their bubbly letters and spray-painted
scrawls. New software can help speed the process by automatically checking graffiti against a
library of street art. The system works by filtering existing images, which are currently captured
and labeled by hand. Given a specific graffiti query, the system finds a list of similar images based
on visual and content similarity, and then returns the gang names associated with those similar
images. Michigan State University computer scientists led by Anil Jain have been working on the
software for a couple years now and plan to present their findings at the ACM Multimedia
conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., later this month.
Boxing
The data in the study was compiled with data collected from medical examinations of 1,181 MMA fighters
and 550 boxers who fought matches in Edmonton, Canada between 2003 and 2013. The researchers found
that while MMA fighters were more likely to get injured—about 60 percent of them had injuries after
matches, compared to about 50 percent of boxers—boxers were the worse for the wear because of the
kinds of injuries they received.Boxers had more severe injuries—broken bones, serious eye injuries—and
lots of head injuries, such as a concussion or losing consciousness during a match. And while some MMA
fighters also had head injuries or lost consciousness, most of their injuries were cuts or contusions.
"Most of the blood you see in mixed martial arts is from bloody noses or facial cuts; it doesn't tend to be
as severe but looks a lot worse than it actually is," said Shelby Karpman, a sports medicine physician and
an author of the study, in a press release.
The fast, fancy, and futuristic cars from the
2018 Geneva Motor Show
McLaren Senna
This swoopy supercar gets its name from one of racing's most famous drivers: Ayrton Senna,
who died in 1994 after a crash at the San Marino Grand Prix. It uses a 4-liter, turbocharged V8
motor that pushes 789 horsepower. That's a lot for a car that weighs roughly 2,700 pounds. All
that power puts its acceleration on another level—its 0-60 mph time is a ridiculous 2.8
seconds. It's a race car that crawls in just under the regulations that make it road legal.
Automatic Weapons
Whether you're for or against guns, if you're a Popular Science reader you're probably in favor
of science. And when it comes to firearms, we're woefully ill-advised on that front. Today,
researchers added yet another scrap of knowledge to the small pile of what we know about
guns in America: semi-automatic rifles allow shooters to wound and kill more people.
 Import Tuners
For go-fast types, it's all about straight-line, quarter-mile performance, largely because drag strips --
unlike twisty road-race circuits -- are accessible to all comers. "You can drive up to Palmdale (home of
the Los Angeles County Raceway) on a Friday night, pay 15 bucks and you're on the track," says Craig
Lieberman, technical advisor to The Fast and the Furious, who also runs one of the four professional
import drag racing series inaugurated in recent years.The import tuner crowd couldn't care less about
road racing, but that hasn't stopped them from appropriating its trappings, from superwide wheels to
rear wings the size of coffee tables. Many of these components are pricey Japanese-spec imports.
Japanese domestic market (JDM) devotees will spend $500 to $1,000 for J-spec headlights. Raymond
Fong, general manager of VeilSide USA, had a customer who dropped $14,000 on a body kit. "And to
install it," Fong says, "he had to pull out the gas tank and put in a fuel cell."
Volvo Group's new military vehicle can drive sideways,
like a crab
You probably haven’t heard of Arquus, a French defense and security vehicle firm, but you
likely do know the company that owns it: Sweden's Volvo Group. And from this subdivision of
Volvo comes a new, light army vehicle: it’s called Scarabée, which is French for “beetle.”The
team's mission at Arquus was to develop an armored military vehicle that is fast, stealthy,
and highly maneuverable. Plus, it has two engines (one electric, one diesel), is
remotely-controllable, and is able to carry over two tons of equipment, including weapons.
It’s even transportable and droppable from a low height, sans parachute, by plane. Scarabée,
which is smaller and faster than an American Humvee, is a candidate to replace the French
Army's fleet of 730 light armored vehicles by 2025.
Monster Energy
A wrongful-death lawsuit filed last week against the makers of Monster energy drinks claims that
14-year-old Anais Fournier drank two 24-ounce cans of Monster in the day before she
unexpectedly died late in 2011. The coroner's report described "caffeine toxicity" as contributing
to her death. Just what does it take to ingest a lethal dose of caffeine?The answer is hard to pin
down, in part because it happens so rarely, but it's clearly a hell of a lot. In an email, Jack James,
the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Caffeine Research, says that overdose for adults requires
roughly 10 grams of caffeine. (People typically ingest just 1 to 2 mg/kg of caffeine per beverage.) A
2005 Forensic Science International article on two fatal caffeine overdoses in New Mexico pegs
the figure closer to about 5 grams--an amount that would still require drinking more than 6
gallons of McDonald's coffee. Whereas a normal cup of coffee might bring the concentration of
caffeine in your plasma to 2.5 to 7 mg/L, the two people who died in New Mexico--a woman who
might've used caffeine to cut intravenous drugs, and a man whose family said he ingested a bottle
of sleeping pills--both had concentrations 100 times higher. (A web application called "Death By
Caffeine" uses a benchmark around 6 grams per hundred pounds of body weight to estimate
death, but it's "for entertainment purposes only."
Centenarians always want to tell you how much beer they drank. How many cigarettes they smoked.
How often they ate bars of chocolate.Similarly, headlines regularly belt out accolades for every study
that purports to show a link between living past 90 and drinking/smoking/eating mac & cheese
three times a day. You know the one—its an article that probably goes something like this:There’s
reason to celebrate if you love/hate [insert whatever habit the study looked at]. A new study suggests
[doing or not doing the thing] might help you live longer. The research looked at a group of [probably a
few thousand people, enough to make you think this is legit] and found that [whatever food or habit we’re
talking about either decreased risk of death or increased average lifespan] by [a small, but statistically
significant, amount]. “Our study found that [insert food/habit] significantly [increases/decreases]
lifespan,” says [lead study author], though s/he cautions that [whatever they found could also be
explained by a third factor]. The study didn’t prove causation, but it did [insert a compelling statistic that
people can cite to their friends].It sounds so familiar because its an appealing story that draws people
in. There’s a reason that scientists study longevity and journalists like us cover their research. We all
want a shortcut to living longer. Unfortunately, scientific work is far more nuanced than a single
sentence can convey, and “eating more nuts may or may not help you live longer, we’ll probably never
know” isn’t a compelling headline.
Marine Corps Want To Make Cheaper Drones
In three minutes, the Scout drone is assembled. One minute more, and it's airborne, tossed
by a Marine. The flight is short, maybe 20 minutes at the most, but the information gained
is valuable, a real-time video of just who or what, exactly, is behind that building a mile
down the road. With the area surveilled, the aptly-named Scout drone flies back, and
suffers a rough landing, snapping a wing. No matter. The squad can print another back at
company HQ after the mission, and have it ready to go in a couple hours.
This Concludes My Presentation