Beware the killer cows
QUESTION How dangerous are cows? Cows are the most dangerous large animal in Britain. According to figures from the Health and safety Executive (HsE), 74 people were killed by cows between 2000 and 2015, twice as many as were killed by dogs in that time.
Most of the victims — 56 — were farm workers. Those who fall foul of the oneton animals are often crushed, butted or trampled to death.
Despite their fearsome reputation, just one of these deaths was caused by a bull. The great majority were caused when calves were present, suggesting maternal defensive aggression might be the cause.
of the members of the public killed by cows, 17 of the 18 were dog walkers, suggesting the cow attack may be a defensive reaction against the pets.
The HsE issues long-standing advice to farmers not to put calves and their mothers in fields accessible to the public. M. Smith, Cromer, Norfolk. QUESTION Why do we lose our accent when we sing? MiCk JAggEr, Elton John, rod stewart, Ed sheeran and Phil Collins grew up in the south and have recognisably British accents. Yet once on stage, they adopt a generic American lilt to their singing.
Likewise, Adele has a strong cockney accent when speaking that almost disappears when she is singing, as does ozzy osbourne’s Brummie brogue.
we see the same phenomenon with European musicians, such as the swedish bands Abba and roxette.
This is thought to be due to two factors, one linguistic, the other social. The very process of singing has an accent neutralising effect. Accent differences are largely created through intonation, vowel quality and vowel length, all of which are affected when we sing.
in singing, syllables are lengthened, air flow is increased and articulation is less precise. Thus we get a more generic, neutralised accent that shares features with American varieties of English.
The pace of the music may also affect the singer’s delivery. A person’s accent is easily detectable when they are speaking at normal speed. when singing, the pace is often slower. words are drawn out and more powerfully pronounced and the accent becomes more neutral.
socially, there is an expectation that popular music will be sung this way. it’s not that singers consciously try to sound American, rather they are adopting the default style for their genre.
As far as why American is predominant, it’s simply because the generic accent is fairly neutral.
such accent neutralisation isn’t inevitable. Artists such as Madness, ian Dury and Lily Allen (London), The Arctic Monkeys (sheffield), The Proclaimers and Biffy Clyro (scotland), Cerys Matthews (wales) and country singers all deliberately articulate their accents to varying degrees when singing.
Ellen Davenport, Bridgnorth, Shropshire. QUESTION What are the colours we see when we rub our eyes? THEsE are known as phosphenes. it is an entoptic phenomenon, meaning the experience of seeing the light occurs within the eye.
The word comes from the greek phos (light) and phainein (to show).
The earliest account of phosphenes is that of the Bohemian physiologist Johannes Purkinje in 1819. Phosphenes were investigated in 1910 by german physician Hermann von Helmholtz, who created a series of attractive drawings based on the phenomenon.
in 1928, german neurosurgeon otfrid Foerster noticed that when he electrically stimulated the surface of the occipital lobe at the back of the brain, the patient experienced the sensation of light.
Phosphenes are most commonly induced simply by closing your eyes and rubbing them or squeezing them shut. generally, the harder you rub or squeeze, the more you’ll see. This pressure stimulates the cells of the retina and makes your brain think you are seeing light.
Phosphenes may be stimulated in several ways. These include electrical stimulation, intense magnetic fields, hallucinogenic drugs, a blow to the head or low blood pressure (such as when you stand up fast after you’ve been relaxing), exposure to radiation and certain diseases of the retina and nerves.
Jean Murray, Perth. QUESTION In the TV series The Last Ship, on more than one occasion the captain orders a full stop by reversing the engines. Everyone is then thrown forward as though in a car making an emergency stop. Would this happen in real life? FUrTHEr to earlier answers, i was a chief engineering artificer on HMs Amazon, a Type 21 frigate, in the midseventies. The main power for these incredible ships was delivered via two olympus gas turbines (the marine equivalent of the engines that powered Concorde and the Vulcan bomber).
This class of ship was the first in the western world wholly powered by gas turbines.
The olympus engines delivered 52,000 shaft horsepower through two 14ft controllable pitch propellers. From dead in the water, these 3,000-ton ships reached 32 knots-plus in 58 seconds.
As chief on watch in the ship’s control centre, perched on my raised swivel chair, i was thrown backward as those huge propellers bit. The torque transferred was incredible.
The vessel could go from full speed to dead in the water in a similar time — a rapid deceleration aided by the propellers acting as giant umbrellas as they went through zero pitch. when this happened, i’d be thrown forward. They were hugely versatile ships and, at that time, nothing could match or catch us.
B. Lambert, Plympton, Devon.
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