The doubly-labeled water technique and video were used to measure the effect of mass loading on energy expenditure and takeoff performance in zebra finches, Taeniopygia guttata, that were making routine (nonalarm) short flights. Finches that carried 27% additional mass did not expend more energy during flight than unloaded controls. Carrying additional mass, however, led to a reduced body mass ...

were scalped when their hair became entangled around the inadequately guarded rotating drivelines or shaft of farm machinery driven by power takeoffs (PTOs). Such entanglement of hair, clothing, or body parts kills and injures many farm workers each year. The recommendations In this Alert will help prevent these entanglement Injuries and deaths. The National Institute for Occupational Safety an...

The richness of life’s possibilities creates a paradox. It poses fundamental limitations on the ability of an organism to reason and act intelligently, as information in its environment is often ambiguous and consistent with an infinite number of interpretations. At the same time, interpretation of this information is required for intelligent action. To further complicate the situation, many pr...

Data describing the historical growth of human population global and regional (Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia, former USSR, Africa and Latin America) are analysed. Results are in harmony with the earlier analysis of the historical growth of the world population in the past 12,000 years and with a similar but limited study carried out over 50 years ago. This analysis is also in harmony wit...

---------------------------------------------------------------------***--------------------------------------------------------------------Abstract This research paper addresses the design problem of heavy payload tethered hexarotor for agricultural applications where payload requirements are high, low altitude long time hovering is expected. Tethered hexarotors are unmanned aerial vehicles wi...

Aerodynamic ground effect in flapping-wing insect flight is of importance to comparative morphologies and of interest to the micro-air-vehicle (MAV) community. Recent studies, however, show apparently contradictory results of either some significant extra lift or power savings, or zero ground effect. Here we present a numerical study of fruitfly sized insect takeoff with a specific focus on the...

A Monte Carlo model designed for fixed-wing aircraft takeoff performance uncertainty quantification is benchmarked. The uses of an efficient simulator this type range from rapid design variable and constraint sensitivity studies large-scale conceptual level analyses to operational planning real-time anomaly detection. accuracy the assessed against high-resolution flight-test data obtained throu...

Sales in a new market generally follow a hockey-stick pattern: after commercialization, sales are very low for some time before there is a dramatic “takeoff” in growth. Reported sales takeoffs across products vary widely from a few years to several decades. Prior research identifies new firm entry or price declines as key factors that relate to the timing of a sales takeoff in new markets. Howe...

An angle-driven computer simulation model of aerial movement was used to determine the maximum amount of twist that could be produced in the second somersault of a double somersault on trampoline using asymmetrical movements of the arms and hips. Lower bounds were placed on the durations of arm and hip angle changes based on performances of a world trampoline champion whose inertia parameters w...