Turns out that woodpeckers don’t need extra shock-absorbers. They are small enough that the normal fluid around their brain provides the protection it needs.
It's yet another application of the square-cube law. As the animal scales smaller, the frontal area of the brain goes down per the second power, while the mass goes down per the third power.
When I finally got over laughing at your incredibly funny response, I got to thinking seriously - the volume, density etc of fluid in the skull is well known together with the physical characteristics of the cranium, brain, etc. It would at the very least be revealing from either real or digital modeling to see what mechanical shock if any the fluid provides.
Exactly. What is not clear to me is whether the chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) from football, boxing etc, is just from the repeated blows to the head or if actual repeated/severe concussions are required. Is there a threshold of head trauma that will not cause CTE or is it all just a matter of degree such that we get a small amount of CTE even with minor blows to the head, and it just accumulates.
Woodpeckers are super cool but whow can they be a menace.
There was one that would come knock my neighbors metal chimney years ago right at the crack of dawn. Poor guy could not sleep in. And the woodpecker kept coming back and doing it, presumably just to make a loud racket because there were no bugs obviously.
Another guy I know who was quite wealthy had a carved wooden lintel made for the top of his door. It was made in Mexico and quite intricate (and expensive). He proudly showed it to me over the door. A week later woodpeckers had ruined it.
There’s a great video by a different scientist that explains the importance of size, mass, and duration of deceleration very clearly. https://youtu.be/a87TTL_c8_0
They have a very long tongue that wraps around their brain. This article is stating that’s just to store the tongue and isn’t some sort of bumper for the brain.
Slightly incorrect - the researchers only looked at bone structure. This was an evaluation of a theory that woodpeckers had an energy dissipating section of bone that protected their brain. That would make for a safer brain, but a worse pecker.
The tongue may still have an effect, but a different study methodology would be needed in order to test that theory.
Now I'm wondering how that's gonna work. De-tongue some woodpeckers and see if they get concussed? There's not any imaging that would work for this is there, where we could paint or inject their tongue with some dye and watch it flex inside their skull? that'd be a lovely video if it could be made.
Microsoft Edge on iPhone had the same response. A script that traps the browser so you can’t use the back button to display a scam ad making it look like I won a Samsung Galaxy S10.
So part of the misconception can be blamed on a connotation of a metaphor that doesn't apply. Very common in physics!