The Ingenious Design of Woodpecker Skull Mechanics

Number of words: 509 Slow-motion footage, X-ray images and computer simulations have shed light on how woodpeckers avoid injuries to their brains as they peck. Their heads move some 6m/s (20ft/s), at each peck enduring a deceleration more than 1,000 times that of gravity. But researchers reporting in Plos One say that unequal upper and lower beak … Read more

The Weight of Innovation: Challenges in Agricultural Design

Number of words: 333 Complex imported ideas, forced through the retort of Indian sensibility, often come out cleansed of content, and harmless; this seems so regularly to lead back, through religion and now science, to the past and nullity: to the spinning wheel, the bullock cart. Intermediate Technology should mean a leap ahead, a leap … Read more