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Make Police1 your homepage. Walk quickly but don't run in a crowd. Download a brochure now! Our own worst enemy. A better escort. While each canister can only be used once, they are quick to change. Officers can aim using fixed sights and a laser sight, usually attached to the bottom of the main assembly. Originally published by Cosmos as How do Tasers work? Cosmos is published by The Royal Institution of Australia, a charity dedicated to connecting people with the world of science. Financial contributions, however big or small, help us provide access to trusted science information at a time when the world needs it most.
Please support us by making a donation or purchasing a subscription today. Share Tweet. The Taser International X26 taser gun with cartridge and spent probes. Jake Port Jake Port contributes to the Cosmos explainer series.
At the closest spots—with one dart hitting at the lower end of the chest wall, and the other at the top of the breastbone—such a cardiac crisis would ensue with about four times the standard Taser capacitance. Our experiments were the first to document that Taser-like impulses, albeit more energetic ones, applied close to the heart on the chest wall in pigs could have serious cardiac consequences.
Even at the standard output of a Taser, we found that current applied to the most vulnerable part of the chest was able to drive the heart to beat up to beats per minute, which is about twice the normal rate for pigs.
These experiments also showed us that the onset of ventricular fibrillation is related to how fast the heart is driven by the impulses—which scales with the amount of current used. Because the standard Taser output proved on average to be one-fourth what was needed to cause fibrillation, one is tempted to conclude that the device is fundamentally safe.
So the Taser has to be safe even for those whose physiology is distorted by the presence of such powerful drugs. Cocaine in particular is a concern with respect to cardiac complications because it raises heart rate and blood pressure and significantly increases the risk of a heart attack even without any kind of shock. My colleagues and I supposed that the presence of such drugs would increase the potential for cardiac arrhythmias, and we later tested this hypothesis in a separate study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
After some thought, we realized that our initially puzzling findings were not entirely out of line, because cocaine has certain anesthetic properties that can affect the electrical behavior of the heart in ways that protect it against shocks and decrease its vulnerability to fibrillation.
Applying enough voltage to a heart cell will open its sodium-ion channels and start the contraction machinery, but cocaine stops up the voltage-activated sodium channels, making it more difficult for electricity to trigger a muscle contraction. Another study carried out at our clinic more recently showed that implantable defibrillators and pacemakers function normally after a typical 5-second electric shock from a Taser.
It remains to be seen, however, how well such medical devices stand up to repeated or longer shocks. It is a challenge to relate experiments conducted under controlled laboratory conditions to the vagaries of real life. For one thing, we obtained our results from anaesthetized pigs with ostensibly normal hearts. No one has yet studied the effects of Taser shocks on such hearts, information that is sorely needed to understand what might prove to be the greatest danger from Tasers.
Even so, we were comforted to learn that stun guns do not normally pose any cardiac risk. The full length of the Taser dart tip would have to embed itself into the skin and chest-wall muscle of a relatively small, thin person to get within the range of distances where we found the heart to be most vulnerable. Furthermore, the most sensitive region for the induction of fibrillation covers just a small area. And it is unlikely that two darts would land there.
Rarely is any biological phenomenon or medical device fully understood and tested, and the Taser is no exception. As more information becomes available, law-enforcement agencies and their officers will better understand the consequences of each pull of the trigger.
Mark W. He sits on the board of Taser International. Patrick Tchou is a cardiologist who specializes in treating cardiac rhythm disturbances at the Cleveland Clinic, a leading research hospital in Ohio. Recent U. To continue operating during pandemic-related shutdowns, organizations around the world underwent digital transformations. Examples include using remote technology to collaborate with employees and customers and employing automation to improve customer experiences.
Now, as the world tries to determine the new normal, many companies are expanding the use of digital transformation as a tool for growth. A recent McKinsey survey on digital transformation during the COVID pandemic shows that organizations sped up the digitization of their customer and supply chain operations after more consumers shifted to online ordering.
Companies that lost revenue in the past few years tended to be behind in using digital technology, the survey found. How can you ensure your organization is prepared for a digital society? Understanding Key Concepts. Technical professionals can come away with an understanding of how digital transformation changes organizations and reshapes market niches while learning about the concept of technological ecosystems.
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This session focuses on psychological, social, and political considerations that could help with deployment. Individuals who complete the course program can earn up to 0. Institutions interested in the program can contact an IEEE account specialist to learn more.
To learn more about how digital transformation can impact your company, register for The Benefits of Digital Transformation for Organizations , a free virtual event to be held on 16 November at noon New York time. The session will be available on demand two hours after the live event concludes. It turns out that you don't need a lot of hardware to make a flying robot.
Flying robots are usually way, way, way over-engineered, with ridiculously over the top components like two whole wings or an obviously ludicrous four separate motors. Maybe that kind of stuff works for people with more funding than they know what to do with, but for anyone trying to keep to a reasonable budget, all it actually takes to make a flying robot is one single airfoil plus an attached fixed-pitch propeller. And if you make that airfoil flexible, you can even fold the entire thing up into a sort of flying robotic swiss roll.
This type of drone is called a monocopter, and the design is very generally based on samara seeds, which are those single-wing seed pods that spin down from maple trees. The ability to spin slows the seeds' descent to the ground, allowing them to spread farther from the tree. It's an inherently stable design, meaning that it'll spin all by itself and do so in a stable and predictable way, which is a nice feature for a drone to have—if everything completely dies, it'll just spin itself gently down to a landing by default.
F-SAM stands for Foldable Single Actuator Monocopter, and as you might expect, it's a monocopter that can fold up and uses just one single actuator for control. There may not be a lot going on here hardware-wise, but that's part of the charm of this design. The one actuator gives complete directional control: increasing the throttle increases the RPM of the aircraft, causing it to gain altitude, which is pretty straightforward.
Directional control is trickier, but not much trickier, requiring repetitive pulsing of the motor at a point during the aircraft's spin when it's pointed in the direction you want it to go. F-SAM is operating in a motion-capture environment in the video to explore its potential for precision autonomy, but it's not restricted to that environment, and doesn't require external sensing for control. While F-SAM's control board was custom designed and the wing requires some fabrication, the rest of the parts are cheap and off the shelf.
If you look closely, you'll also see a teeny little carbon fiber leg of sorts that keeps the prop up above the ground, enabling the ground takeoff behavior without contacting the ground. You can find the entire F-SAM paper open access here , but we also asked the authors a couple of extra questions. IEEE Spectrum: It looks like you explored different materials and combinations of materials for the flexible wing structure.
Why did you end up with this mix of balsa wood and plastic? Shane Kyi Hla Win: The wing structure of a monocopter requires rigidity in order to be controllable in flight. Although it is possible for the monocopter to fly with more flexible materials we tested, such as flexible plastic or polymide flex, they allow the wing to twist freely mid-flight making cyclic control effort from the motor less effective.
The balsa laminated with plastic provides enough rigidity for an effective control, while allowing folding in a pre-determined triangular fold. Can F-SAM fly outdoors? What is required to fly it outside of a motion capture environment? Yes it can fly outdoors. It is passively stable so it does not require a closed-loop control for its flight. The motion capture environment provides its absolute position for station-holding and waypoint flights when indoors.
For outdoor flight, an electronic compass provides the relative heading for the basic cyclic control. We are working on a prototype with an integrated GPS for outdoor autonomous flights. A camera can be added we have done this before , but due to its spinning nature, images captured can come out blurry.
A conventional LiDAR system requires a dedicated actuator to create a spinning motion. Your paper says that "in the future, we may look into possible launching of F-SAM directly from the container, without the need for human intervention.
Currently, F-SAM can be folded into a compact form and stored inside a container. However, it still requires a human to unfold it and either hand-launch it or put it on the floor to fly off. In the future, we envision that F-SAM is put inside a container which has the mechanism such as pressured gas to catapult the folded unit into the air, which can begin unfolding immediately due to elastic materials used.
The motor can initiate the spin which allows the wing to straighten out due to centrifugal forces. F-SAM could be a good toy but it may not be a good alternative to quadcopters if the objective is conventional aerial photography or videography. However, it can be a good contender for single-use GPS-guided reconnaissance missions. As it uses only one actuator for its flight, it can be made relatively cheaply. It is also very silent during its flight and easily camouflaged once landed.
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