The Physics of Superman

eieken writes "The physics of Superman mostly belong in the realm of comic books, but some scientists decided to give their input on the matter. The article tells of 'a scientific experiment in which a researcher put several chickens in a centrifuge and raised them in twice-normal gravity for months at a time. When they emerged, the chickens were stronger and had larger bones and muscles, and greater endurance. In other words, they were superchickens.' Do they have human sized centrifuges?"

Comments

Re:Question...

[swillden]

Chickens can fly

Not really. Chickens can fly for very short distances and limited heights. They can get over fences and travel maybe 40 feet at a time. After one such "long" flight, they can barely get off the ground and prefer to run.

they just have their wings clipped to prevent this.

Chickens that are kept outdoors in pens without high walls have their wings clipped. I don't know what the minimum "safe" wall height is, but most unroofed outdoor pens I've seen use wire mesh about seven feet high. Smaller pens can use shorter walls because the chickens need quite a bit of horizontal room to reach their maximum height above ground. Wing clipping doesn't actually reduce their wings' lift much, mainly it just removes the ends of the primary feathers which are necessary for controlled flight. Chicken flight is pretty erratic and wild at best, and without those feather tips they just can't control it at all.

Re:Human centrifuge - the Gravitron

[D4MO]

I worked in one of those for a whole summer once. I was that dude in the centre with the speed button. So I basically spent about 12 hours a day spinning for about 4 months. The trick to not getting totally fucked up was not to move your head outside the plane of rotation. Move head left and right, fine, but if you moved up and down it was trippy. At the end of every ride, someone would always ask why I wasn't sticking to the walls...

The amusement park was right beside a beach so I'd get chicks coming in with their two piece bikini's. At a certain speed of rotation, the panel you lean against would slide up. At this speed and force, a lot of the women couldn't lift their arms and hands away from beside them - they were as good as pinned down. It took me a few weeks, but I pefected tweaking the speed just right to have those panels slide up and down repeatedly. And in doing so, I managed to "jiggle" many a breast out from under a bikini top!

Yeah, I'll go to hell, but damn, it made the job worthwhile ;)