Month: March 2009

Does the thought of whizzing through a loop-the-loop in an open car make your heart beat a little faster?  How do you feel about riding that car straight down from 150 feet above the ground?  Just gotta try it?

To millions of visitors annually, roller coasters are the highlights of theme parks.  Many of the most spectacular of those rides such as SheiKra at Busch Gardens Tampa or Dragon Kahn at Port Aventura, Spain began as designs at St. Louis architecture firm PGAV.

As explained by the designers at PGAV, successful coasters use a fiendish knowledge of psychology firmly grounded in the basics of physics.  (A bit of human physiology is also incorporated to make the rides very safe.)

Here’s how Bill Castle, vice president of PGAV, explains the psychological scripting of a “dive coaster” like SheiKra, recently named the top coaster in central Florida:

“You start out with a little fear.  Your trepidation increases as you go up—the clickety click of the lift gets on your nerves.  Then you hang at the top looking down 200 feet for about ten seconds, with the suspense constantly building.  The adrenaline is in full flower when you go down that drop, and every nerve in your body is tingling.  Time seems to slow down, and you are hyperaware.  At the bottom of the (200 foot) drop you go into a long pullout and begin another climb.  It’s all energy management—fast and slow, high and low.”

 

Read the entire article (500KB PDF).
This article was originally published in the St. Louis Beacon.

When Rainer Bussmann discovered a new plant species in the Andean cloud forest in Peru, he saw both opportunity for the native population and an inducement to preserve the forest where the plant grows. The seeds from that plant could be roasted and turned into a highly nutritious snack. The snack could be sold around the world and the revenue generated could improve the lives of Peruvian farmers.

Translating discovery into results is routine for Bussmann, an ethnobotanist and director of the Missouri Botanical Garden’s William L. Brown Center. “Ethnobotany is the science of how people use plants,” he explained. Since plants enter into almost every human endeavor, from sustaining life as food to giving us pleasure in gardens and wilderness, ethnobotany covers a lot of ground.

A major part of the ethnobotanist’s focus is discovery. There is a sense of urgency about finding and evaluating new plant species, because specimen-rich environments like rain forests are being destroyed constantly. Since only a small fraction of the estimated plant species have been evaluated for human use, the very plant that holds the key to curing Ted Kennedy’s type of brain cancer could be wiped out if a new gold mine is excavated in the Andean cloud forest.

 

Read the entire article (1.5MB PDF).
This article was originally published in the St. Louis Beacon.