Tech
Pro-cycling crashes can be bad, but evidence suggests slower bikes aren’t the answer
It might seem counterintuitive in a sport built around speed, but the world governing body for competitive cycling wants to slow elite riders down.
Worried about high-speed crashes during pro-racing events, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) has proposed a cap on the gear size riders can use. The idea is to lower the possible top speed bikes can achieve.
The risks are real, too. At the recent Tour Down Under Men’s Classic in Australia, a high-speed multi-rider crash on the final corner sent bikes into the barriers and into the crowd, badly injuring a spectator.
In August this year, champion British rider Chris Froome crashed while training in France, suffering a collapsed lung, broken ribs and a spinal fracture.
But would restricting gear size prevent these kinds of high-speed crashes? Certainly, not everyone thinks so.
Earlier this month, a Belgian court paused the rule change after teams and a major cycle component maker argued the safety case was not proven. While slower bikes might sound safer, they argue, the evidence tells a different story.
What the evidence tells us
The proposed rule would limit the largest gear size to 54 teeth on the front chainring and 11 on the rear sprocket. The idea is simple: lower the top gear to reduce top speed and, in theory, cut risk.
But while speed clearly matters when it comes to crashes, it is only one part of how they happen in a tightly packed peloton (the main pack of riders in a road race).
Our recent review of 18 studies of race speed and crash risk found two clear patterns:
- higher speed makes injuries worse once a crash occurs
- but the link between speed and the chance of crashing is weaker and depends on context.
Injury rates in the UCI WorldTour have climbed even though average race speeds have been steady. So, something else is at work.
We also examined the proposed gear cap itself. Based on our analysis, we argue any rule change should be evidence-based rather than simply a reaction to pressure after high-profile incidents.
Understanding why crashes occur is central to this. Essentially, they are about people and space, and happen for a number of reasons:
- when riders fight for position as they enter a narrowing corner
- when sprint “trains” (riders in the same team lining up for aerodynamic efficiency) cross wheels
- or when road “furniture” appears too late to be avoided.
In this year’s Paris–Nice race, for example, Mattias Skjelmose struck a traffic island at speed and abandoned the race. Reports described it as a poorly marked obstacle.
Course design, peloton density and inconsistent rule enforcement often play a bigger role than a few extra kilometers per hour.
Why a gear limit won’t help much
On hill descents, where many serious injuries occur, riders freewheel in a tucked body position. Gravity and aerodynamics set the speed—gearing does not.
When riders are actually pedaling in a sprint, a 54×11 gear at high “cadence” (around 110–120 revolutions per minute) gives a speed of roughly 65 kilometers per hour (km/h). The very fastest finishes in elite men’s races reach about 75 km/h—the absolute peak speed.
A cap on gearing would trim roughly 5–10 km/h from the top-end, bringing the fastest sprints down to around 65–70 km/h. But most sprint pileups start below those speeds and are triggered by contact or line changes.
Lowering everyone’s top speed could even bunch the field more tightly and raise the risk of contact. The pro-cycling world already knows what helps:
These steps match what other high-speed sports have done to reduce injuries. Motor sports redesign the environment rather than just limit speed, with NASCAR and IndyCar having adopted energy-absorbing barriers to cut wall-impact forces.
And alpine skiing manages risk with course design, as well as nets and airbag protection to control speed and crash severity.
Similar approaches to safety are used in aviation, mining and health care. The aim is to focus on the environment and behavior, measure exposure, fix the hotspots and share what works to keep improving safety.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Top Design Within Reach Promo Codes for March 2026
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Tech
A Billionaire-Backed Startup Wants to Grow ‘Organ Sacks’ to Replace Animal Testing
As the Trump administration phases out the use of animal experimentation across the federal government, a biotech startup has a bold idea for an alternative to animal testing: nonsentient “organ sacks.”
Bay Area-based R3 Bio has been quietly pitching the idea to investors and in industry publications as a way to replace lab animals without the ethical issues that come with living organisms. That’s because these structures would contain all of the typical organs—except a brain, rendering them unable to think or feel pain. The company’s long-term goal, cofounder Alice Gilman says, is to make human versions that could be used as a source of tissues and organs for people who need them.
For Immortal Dragons, a Singapore-based longevity fund that’s invested in R3, the idea of replacement is a core strategy for human longevity. “We think replacement is probably better than repair when it comes to treating diseases or regulating the aging process in the human body,” says CEO Boyang Wang. “If we can create a nonsentient, headless bodyoid for a human being, that will be a great source of organs.”
For now, R3 is aiming to make monkey organ sacks. “The benefit of using models that are more ethical and are exclusively organ systems would be that testing can be meaningfully more scalable,” Gilman says. (R3’s name comes from the philosophy in animal research known as the three R’s—replacement, reduction, and refinement—developed by British scientists William Russell and Rex Burch in 1959 to promote humane experimentation.)
New drugs are often tested in monkeys before they’re given to human participants in clinical trials. For instance, monkeys were critical during the Covid-19 pandemic for testing vaccines and therapeutics. But they’re also an expensive resource, and their numbers are dwindling in the US after China banned the export of nonhuman primates in 2020.
Animal rights activists have long pushed to end research on monkeys, and one of the seven federally funded primate research facilities across the country has signaled it would consider shutting down and transitioning into a sanctuary amid growing pressure. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also winding down monkey research, part of a bigger trend across the government to reduce reliance on animal testing.
As a result, Gilman says, there aren’t enough research monkeys left in the US to allow for necessary research if another pandemic threat emerges. Enter organ sacks.
Organ sacks would in theory offer advantages over existing organs-on-chips or tissue models, which lack the full complexity of whole organs, including blood vessels.
Gilman says it’s already possible to create mouse organ sacks that lack a brain, though she and cofounder John Schloendorn deny that R3 has made them. (For the record, Gilman doesn’t like the term “brainless” to describe the organ sacks. “It’s not missing anything, because we design it to only have the things we want,” she says.) Gilman and Schloendorn would not say how exactly they plan to create the monkey and human organ sacks, but said they are exploring a combination of stem-cell technology and gene editing.
It’s plausible that organ sacks could be grown from induced pluripotent stem cells, says Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist at the University of California, Davis. These stem cells come from adult skin cells and are reprogrammed to an embryonic-like state. They have the potential to form into any cell or tissue in the body and have been used to create embryo-like structures that resemble the real thing. By editing these stem cells, scientists could disable genes needed for brain development. The resulting embryo could then be incubated until it grows into organized organ structures.
Tech
A Mysterious Numbers Station Is Broadcasting Through the Iran War
“Tavajoh! Tavajoh! Tavajoh!” a man’s voice announces, before going on to narrate a string of numbers in no apparent order, slowly and rhythmically. After nearly two hours, the calls of “Attention!” in Persian stop, only to resume again hours later.
The broadcast has been playing twice a day on a shortwave frequency since the start of the US-Israel attack on Iran on February 28.
According to Priyom, an organization which tracks and analyses global military and intelligence use of shortwave radio, using established radio-location techniques, the broadcast was first heard as the US bombing of Iran began. It has since played on the 7910 kHz shortwave frequency like clockwork—at 02.00 UTC and again at 18.00 UTC.
Over the weekend, Priyom said it had identified the likely origin of the broadcast. Using multilateration and triangulation techniques, the group traced the signal to a shortwave transmission facility inside a US military base in Böblingen, southwest of Stuttgart, Germany.
The site lies within a restricted training area between Panzer Kaserne and Patch Barracks, with technical operations possibly linked to the US army’s 52nd Strategic Signal Battalion, headquartered nearby.
That identification narrows the field, but it does not reveal who is behind the transmissions or who they are meant for.
The two-hour-long transmission is divided into five to six segments, each lasting up to 20 minutes. Each opens with “Tavajoh!” before shifting into a string of numbers in Persian, sometimes punctuated with an English word or two. Five days into the broadcast, radio jammers were heard attempting to block the frequency. The following day, the transmission shifted to a different frequency—7842 kHz.
Radio communication experts believe the broadcast is likely part of a Cold War–era system known as number stations.
The Return of the Numbers
Number stations are shortwave radio broadcasts that play strings of numbers or codes that sound random—like the one now heard in Iran. “It is an encrypted radio message used by foreign intelligence services, often as part of a complex operation by intelligence agencies and militaries,” says Maris Goldmanis, a Latvian historian and avid numbers stations researcher.
Number stations are most commonly associated with espionage. “For intelligence agencies, it is important to communicate with their spies to gather intelligence,” says John Sipher, a former US intelligence officer who served 28 years in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. “This is not always possible in person due to political constraints or conflict. This is where number stations come in.”
While the use of number stations can be traced back to the First World War, they gained prominence during the US-Soviet Cold War. As espionage grew more sophisticated, governments used automated voice transmissions of coded numbers to communicate with agents, Goldmanis says. Citing declassified KGB and CIA documents, he adds that number stations were widely used during this period, often as Morse code transmissions and, in many cases, as two-way communications, with agents reporting back using their own shortwave transmitters.
“Nowadays, you have various satellite and encrypted communications technologies,” Sipher says. “But during the Cold War and even before that, governments had to find ways to do this without being noticed, and broadcasting coded messages was one way to communicate with your assets discreetly.”
The apparent randomness of the numbers means they can be understood only with a codebook, Sipher adds. “Nobody can make heads or tails of it or understand what it says unless you have the codebook that can give you hints to decrypt the code,” he says, noting that such systems must be set up and coordinated in advance.
A Signal Without a Sender
While the likely origin of the signal may now be clearer, its purpose and intended recipient remain unknown.
Because the broadcasts are encrypted and designed to be covert, those details may remain unclear for years, Goldmanis says. The structured nature of the transmission—its fixed schedule and consistent use of frequencies—further suggests it is part of a planned operation.
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