The US Swim Team's Secret Weapon, Science

Hugh Pickens writes "When American Swimmer Margaret Hoelzer goes for the gold tonight in the 200-meter backstroke, part of her success will be due to a new system developed by Tim Wei, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, that uses fluid dynamics to study human movement allowing scientists and coaches to study how fast and hard a swimmer pushes the water as he moves through it. 'Wei uses a tracking technique called digital particle image velocimetry, commonly used to measure the flow of small particles around an airplane or small fish or crustaceans in water.' Wei filtered compressed air in a scuba tank through a porous hose to create bubbles about a tenth of a millimeter in diameter. When an athlete swims through a sheet of bubbles that rises from the pool floor, a camera captures their flow around the swimmer's body and the images show the direction and speed of the bubbles, which Wei then translates into the swimmer's thrust using software that he wrote."

Comments

Re:Sexism

[rehtonAesoohC]

What you've referred to is called a misplaced modifier, and it occurs when the wrong noun or pronoun is referred to as the precursor to a verb.

For instance, note the following sentence: "I walked down the street, saw a boy and a bike, and he was walking quickly." In this example, the sentence attempts to reference the boy, but actually references the bike. The original statement is grammatically correct.

I'm an English teacher you insensitive clod!

Re:Changing is easier said then done.

[ckthorp]

Have you watched the Olympic athletes who have competed in Dancing with the Stars? When it comes to taking direction and altering their physical performance in a short period of time, they're absolutely awe-inspiring. If you're an Olympic athlete, you better be able to quickly make major changes based on either computerized or human coaching instructions. It's like watching a professional actor rapidly portray a half dozen different personae.

There's nothing that special about the pool

[snowwrestler]

It is engineered to reduce turbulence but no more than other top-level pools around the world. Pools with 10 lanes, slop gutters to eat waves, and greater then 2m depth are not unheard of. Besides, while plenty of world records are being beaten at these Olympics, plenty were also beaten before the Olympics...in the last year or two many world records have gone down at other events. Before each race NBC puts up a listing of the current world record for that event. Take a look--many are dated 2006 or 2007; some date back a few more years, but none are very old.

We happen to be in a period of dramatic change in swimming right now, and there are probably a number of reasons. If you want to point to just one, it is probably that there is a lot more money in the sport now. So Michael Phelps could afford, through endorsements and grants, to train at a full-time professional level since he was an early teen. This has huge implications for his technique, fitness, health, and mental toughness for competition.