Building a Better Bike Helmet Out of Paper

An anonymous reader writes "Inspired by nature, a London man believes the solution to safer bike helmets is to build them out of paper. '"The animal that stood out was the woodpecker. It pecks at about ten times per second and every time it pecks it sustains the same amount of force as us crashing at 50 miles per hour," says Surabhi. "It's the only bird in the world where the skull and the beak are completely disjointed, and there's a soft corrugated cartilage in the middle that absorbs all the impact and stops it from getting a headache." In order to mimic the woodpecker's crumple zone, Anirudha turned to a cheap and easily accessible source — paper. He engineered it into a double-layer of honeycomb that could then be cut and constructed into a functioning helmet. "What you end up with is with tiny little airbags throughout the helmet," he says.'"

Comments

Re:Bike helmet?

[Anonymous Coward]

As has been posted to Slashdot before, the data on helmet protection is equivocal. In many large scale studies, increase in helmet use does not reduce severe brain injuries, and could possibly increase the rate.

Why? 1) Helmets might make bikers less cautious; 2) helmets might make car drivers less cautious; 3) a helmet can only absorb so much energy, and in many categories of severe crashes you're going to cross the threshold of severe brain injury regardless of a helmet (in other words the range of energies a helmet can protect you from might not overlap well with the kinds of crashes you need to worry about).

Re:Bike helmet?

[icebike]

None of the reasons you post support your suggestion that helmet use does not reduce severe brain injuries or actually increase it. They are ludicrous at best.

In 30 years on a bike, I've never ever seen someone say, oh, I have this helmet, lets see if I can skid right under that semi and out the other side. People who take ridiculous risks will take them without helmets just as often as with.

The research only supports one assertion about increased injuries caused by helmets, and that is a marginal increase in neck injuries from the helmet catching on the roadway surface as you go sliding along. However, even this research recognizes this increase in neck injuries is a trade off compared to abraded to the bone head road-rash that would otherwise occur in the identical crash.

That being said, when broadsided by a semi, a helmet won't help you. And its probably pointless to require them by law.