(Press-News.org) PULLMAN, Wash. – Two nearly identical softballs, both approved for league play, can have dramatically different effects when smacked into a player's head.
Those are the findings from a study conducted by Professor Lloyd Smith in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and project engineer Derek Nevins that they will present at the Asia Pacific Congress on Sports Technology later this month in Hong Kong. Their work was published in the journal, Procedia Engineering.
Smith's group developed a unique model of a softball that they electronically throw at a virtual head to better understand and prevent injuries.
About a quarter of the injuries that happen on the softball field come from players getting hit with a ball, either thrown or batted at them. Most vulnerable are the pitcher, base runner, and third baseman. When they do occur, the injuries are almost always serious, oftentimes including a bone fracture, says Smith.
In many sports, balls are standardized for consistency and performance. But, researchers haven't understood specifically how the balls' different properties and materials affect player safety. They haven't been able to measure just how much or how it hurts when a ball hits a head.
While there have been human models for years, the ball is the hard part, says Smith. Models of softball collisions are especially challenging because of a low Coefficient of Restitution, or how the energy is transferred between the ball and what it hits, he says. Depending on its elasticity and its stiffness, the ball deforms and dissipates energy differently.
The researchers married the ball model they developed with Thums, or the Total Human Model for Safety. Thums sits on a computer screen – a perfect, computerized skeletal model of a head developed by Toyota for crash testing. He has a rainbow of different colored eye sockets, teeth, and detailed skull features, including the temporal and parietal bone, facial muscles, and even his cerebrospinal fluid. He looks like he's smiling, although it's not clear he's still smiling when the ball comes at the front and side of his head at between 60 and 120 miles per hour. He is called a 50th percentile male -- or an average guy.
In their study with the softball model, the researchers determined that two softballs that are commonly used for the same level of amateur play have significantly different properties and result in big differences in potential injury. The two balls differed in stiffness by 30 percent. Testing against a virtual head resulted in as much as a 64 percent difference in bone stress, or how badly he was hurt.
"For most impact conditions, bone stress exceeded the assumed bone strength,'' write the researchers.
That means that their virtual head ended up with a serious fractured skull.
The researchers hope that their ball model work can be extended to better understand more subtle but serious collision injuries, such as concussions, as well as lead to improved protective equipment and injury prevention in a number of sports.
### END
Researchers hit virtual heads to make safer games
When softball and noggin meet, not all are alike
2013-09-12
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
The efficient choice among combustion engines
2013-09-12
Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed an internal combustion engine that emits less than half the CO2 compared to a regular engine without compromising performance. This corresponds to fuel consumption of less than 2.4l per 100km. This natural gas-diesel hybrid engine is based on a system of sophisticated control engineering.
The global energy markets are changing. New extraction methods are tapping into oilfields and natural gas deposits that have been inaccessible until now. The US, for example, is able to cover up to 83% of its total energy needs today; the government ...
Delaying climate policy would triple short-term mitigation costs
2013-09-12
Higher costs would in turn increase the threshold for decision-makers to start the transition to a low-carbon economy. Thus, to keep climate targets within reach it seems to be most relevant to not further postpone mitigation, the researchers conclude.
"The transitional economic repercussions that would result if the switch towards a climate-friendly economy is delayed, are comparable to the costs of the financial crisis the world just experienced," lead-author Gunnar Luderer says. The later climate policy implementation starts, the faster – hence the more expensive – ...
Pulsating dust cloud dynamics modeled
2013-09-12
The birth of stars is an event that eludes intuitive understanding. It is the collapse of dense molecular clouds under their own weight that offers the best sites of star formation. Now, Pralay Kumar Karmakar from the Department of Physics at Tezpur University, Assam province, India, and his colleague have proposed a new model for investigating molecular cloud fluctuations at sites of star formation and thus are able to study their pulsational dynamics, in a paper published in EPJ D.
Dust molecular clouds are a type of astrophysical plasmas, which are composed of a primordial ...
More than just type 1 or type 2: DiMelli study points to different forms of diabetes
2013-09-12
The DiMelli (Diabetes Mellitus Incidence Cohort Registry) study examines the frequency and characteristics of diabetes phenotypes in children and young adults below the age of 20. The study was commissioned to investigate the increasing incidence of diabetes mellitus, particularly in childhood and early adulthood. The project is funded by the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD). Bioprobe measurements were performed centrally by the Central Medical Laboratory (LMZ) at the Helmholtz Zentrum München (HMGU) so as to guarantee the high quality and comparability of laboratory ...
Codeine could increase users' sensitivity to pain
2013-09-12
Using large and frequent doses of the pain-killer codeine may actually produce heightened sensitivity to pain, without the same level of relief offered by morphine, according to new research from the University of Adelaide.
Researchers in the Discipline of Pharmacology have conducted what is believed to be the world's first experimental study comparing the pain relieving and pain worsening effects of both codeine and morphine.
The University's Professor Paul Rolan, who is also a headache specialist at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, says codeine has been widely used as ...
Dogs' behavior could help to design social robots
2013-09-12
Designers of social robots, take note. Bring your dog to the lab next time you test a prototype, and watch how your pet interacts with it. You might just learn a thing or two that could help you fine-tune future designs. So says Gabriella Lakatos of the Hungarian Academy of Science and Eötvös Loránd University, lead author of a study¹ published in Springer's journal Animal Cognition that found that man's best friend reacts sociably to robots that behave socially towards them, even if the devices look nothing like a human.
This animal behavior study tested the reaction ...
Study explores complex physical oceanography in East China Sea
2013-09-12
Just days before a team of researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and National Taiwan University set out to conduct fieldwork in the East China Sea, Typhoon Morakot—one of the most destructive storms ever to hit Taiwan—made landfall on the island, causing widespread damage and drastically altering the flow of water along the nearby continental shelf.
The typhoon, which struck in Aug. 2009, caused catastrophic damage in Taiwan, killing several hundred people and dropping up to 2 meters of rain in just 5 days in the mountains.
In their work to understand ...
Uros people of Peru and Bolivia found to have distinctive genetic ancestries
2013-09-12
RESEARCH CONCLUSIONS: New genetic research led by the Genographic Project
consortium shows a distinctive ancestry for the Uros populations of Peru and Bolivia that
predates the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores and may date back to the earliest settlement
of the Altiplano, or high plain, of the central Andes some 3,700 years ago. Despite the fact that
the Uros today share many lineages with the surrounding Andean populations, they have
maintained their own divergent genetic ancestry.
WHO ARE THE UROS?: The Uros are a self-identified ethnic group, about 2,000 ...
Women have higher rate of spontaneous clearance of hepatitis C virus
2013-09-12
A study of patients infected with acute hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection found that women had higher rates of spontaneous viral clearance—undetectable levels of the virus without initiating drug therapy. Findings published in Hepatology, a journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, indicate that the gene IL28B (rs12979860) and HCV genotype 1 are also independent predictors of spontaneous HCV clearance.
In 2011, there were 1,229 cases of acute HCV reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Infection (CDC), which represents a 44% increase ...
Carnegie Mellon researchers say Twitter analysis can help gamblers beat the spread on NFL games
2013-09-12
PITTSBURGH—Analyses of Twitter feeds have been used to track flu epidemics, predict stock market changes and do political polling, but now that the National Football League season is underway, the natural question is: Can Twitter help beat the spread on NFL games?
The answer, say computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, is yes. Or, at least it can help a little bit at certain times during the season. They will report their findings Sept. 27 at the Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics conference in Prague, Czech Republic.
The study began as ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
Reality check: making indoor smartphone-based augmented reality work
Overthinking what you said? It’s your ‘lizard brain’ talking to newer, advanced parts of your brain
Black men — including transit workers — are targets for aggression on public transportation, study shows
Troubling spike in severe pregnancy-related complications for all ages in Illinois
Alcohol use identified by UTHealth Houston researchers as most common predictor of escalated cannabis vaping among youths in Texas
Need a landing pad for helicopter parenting? Frame tasks as learning
New MUSC Hollings Cancer Center research shows how Golgi stress affects T-cells' tumor-fighting ability
#16to365: New resources for year-round activism to end gender-based violence and strengthen bodily autonomy for all
Earliest fish-trapping facility in Central America discovered in Maya lowlands
São Paulo to host School on Disordered Systems
New insights into sleep uncover key mechanisms related to cognitive function
USC announces strategic collaboration with Autobahn Labs to accelerate drug discovery
Detroit health professionals urge the community to act and address the dangers of antimicrobial resistance
3D-printing advance mitigates three defects simultaneously for failure-free metal parts
Ancient hot water on Mars points to habitable past: Curtin study
In Patagonia, more snow could protect glaciers from melt — but only if we curb greenhouse gas emissions soon
Simplicity is key to understanding and achieving goals
Caste differentiation in ants
Nutrition that aligns with guidelines during pregnancy may be associated with better infant growth outcomes, NIH study finds
New technology points to unexpected uses for snoRNA
Racial and ethnic variation in survival in early-onset colorectal cancer
Disparities by race and urbanicity in online health care facility reviews
Exploring factors affecting workers' acquisition of exercise habits using machine learning approaches
Nano-patterned copper oxide sensor for ultra-low hydrogen detection
Maintaining bridge safer; Digital sensing-based monitoring system
A novel approach for the composition design of high-entropy fluorite oxides with low thermal conductivity
A groundbreaking new approach to treating chronic abdominal pain
ECOG-ACRIN appoints seven researchers to scientific committee leadership positions
New model of neuronal circuit provides insight on eye movement
Cooking up a breakthrough: Penn engineers refine lipid nanoparticles for better mRNA therapies
[Press-News.org] Researchers hit virtual heads to make safer gamesWhen softball and noggin meet, not all are alike