There are ~40–50,000 History podcasts globally. According to @goodpods this would put Doomsday in the top 0.016%, or the 99.98th percentile of History Podcasts. Huh.
Apple https://t.co/P2CwKYtxDv
Spotify https://t.co/k9R8SOv35a
#disaster#history#safety#doomsday#goodpods
@FlightEmergency@AirNavRadar Johnny Headphones there with the "is something going on" face has the same look as a guy who insists on grabbing his overhead luggage during the evacuation.
I've recently been helping run experiments to reduce accidents at train stations. It's a big issue and many falls are caused by people rushing. But how do you change that behaviour when most people are too frantic to pay attention to messaging?
Well we (Joanna Stanley, Anita Brown, Paul Corney at Avanti West Coast and I) decided to build on existing findings on the calming role of music.
For example, Charles Spence from the University of Oxford found in a 2024 study with South Western Railway that nature soundscapes (e.g. birdsong, flowing rivers) in the carriage reduced people's stress by 35%.
Similarly, in 2014, Marek Franěk from the University of Hradec Králové in the Czech Republic found that downtempo music made people walk 12% slower than an uptempo soundtrack when walking a 2km circuit.
We wanted to see if more fleeting exposure could have a positive effect. Our test was at Stoke train station. We picked a subway and used a stopwatch to record how long it took people to walk through it. With no music playing, people took 16.15 seconds on average.
Then we rotated four different soundtracks in 30-minute intervals:
⛱️ Relaxing music (528 HZ)
🎻 Slow-tempo classical music
🎙️ Easy listening music
🕊️ Birdsong
Every musical intervention slowed people down but playing birdsong had the biggest effect - in that setting, it took people 17.43 seconds to cross the subway. That's 8% slower than with no music.
Of course, this study is a one-off, so it needs to be replicated to see if the effect holds. But it sits within a broader body of research on the positive effects of music on public behaviour.
This is a fascinating area of research - and one that has the potential for simple, low-cost applications to make public spaces a little safer.
A locomotive struck a septic truck crossing the tracks in Chesapeake, Virginia, sending the truck flying and leaving the driver with life-threatening injuries. https://t.co/sVkx5pnhq4
@sciencegirl Hero of the stupid. I preach safety for a living, but every now and then I see someone so far out of reach, I start to think their corpses should be used to fill potholes.
@sciencegirl When you really think about the mechanics of how the earth rotates and it turns into "wait, at the bottom of the globe, they're going to kind see it from the periphery, no?", so you save up your money and travel to a polar region and blow your own mind.
This is basically our Galeras episode, repeated almost beat per beat, but set in Singapore. Two beautiful countries. Two horrifying human disasters. #dukono#volcano#singapore
Deadly Dukono eruption update:
Two hikers from Singapore who had been missing since the eruption have now been confirmed dead. An Indonesian woman was also found earlier near the crater area.
17 others made it off the volcano alive.
Search and rescue teams have been dealing with continuing eruptions, falling ash and terrible conditions on the mountain, making recovery efforts extremely difficult.
Officials are now reportedly looking into how climbers were able to enter the area despite restrictions already being in place around the volcano.