Future of College and Pro Football Potentially Saved by the Mantis Shrimp - New Helmets

Submitted by markusr2007 on

Good news. The propellor heads agreed to meet with the marine biologists at Starbucks this week.  Maybe they'll tailgate together this fall?

Headline:

Mantis Shrimp Inspires New Body Armor and Football Helmet Design

"Researchers find mantis shrimp is naturally designed to survive the repeated high-velocity blows by filtering out certain frequencies of waves"

“This is a novel concept,” said David Kisailus, the Winston Chung Endowed Professor in Energy Innovation at UC Riverside’s Bourns College of Engineering. “It implies that we can make composite materials able to filter certain stress waves that would otherwise damage the material.”

All hail, engineering and science students!

Gulo Blue

June 18th, 2015 at 4:52 PM ^

I thought we should be studying woodpeckers to figure out how to avoid brain injury, but the mantis shrimp takes it to another level. Those critters  are crazy.

bluebyyou

June 18th, 2015 at 5:16 PM ^

The key term here is "potentially."  Woodpecker and other animal heads have been brought up before as something to explore, but the problem goes deeper than attenuating certain waves, although that might help. Studies have shown that when two players collide and there is no head to head contact you still have brain movement based solely on accelerative/decelerative forces from the head and neck - even with necks larger than most people's thighs, you still have whiplash.

The other problem that this might not address is when you have hits that have a rotational component to the force.

JeepinBen

June 18th, 2015 at 5:16 PM ^

I mean, filtering out all types of blows sounds great but the problem with a new helmet isn't just that it has to filter blows, but are they going to have a composite material that works for all kinds of stuff? 350lb linemen and 180lb CBs? different angles, speeds, rebounds/hitting the turf, etc? Sounds like a huge engineering problem to me.

Similarly, the helmet has to look "cool" enough. There are already helmets that work a lot better than what 99% of players wear, they just don't want to look like this:

Ghost of Fritz…

June 18th, 2015 at 5:30 PM ^

..that the mantis shrimp is not getting all loopy with repetive brain trauma by early middle age? Maybe their brains end up like early middle aged football player brains. 

xtramelanin

June 18th, 2015 at 9:55 PM ^

cause wow, you grow one big enough you could sure disrupt a run scheme.  and boil your opponent about 3000 degrees kelvin and squish their guts.  second string on the other team would say ,'ah, gee coach, got a bit of a stomach bug, maybe pick one of the walk-ons to go in now, okay?'

phork

June 19th, 2015 at 7:49 AM ^

Unless we can find a way to keep your brain from sloshing about in the bone bowl that is your head, then it doesn't matter what you have on.  Speed + Sudden Stop == Concussed.

What we need to do is surgically implant pins through the brain and screw them into the skull.