“Eve and Candace caught Tom Shields after a panel at Nationals. As one of our new favorite swimmer babies, we wanted to get to know him a little better and asked a few simple questions.”
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Pawel Achtel working to improve underwater optics
See Catalyst
There’s a basic reality of physics that photographers can’t avoid – light behaves differently in water than in air. This is a story of one man’s ingenuity to overcome the optical challenges of filming underwater.
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Iranian swimmer Elham Asghari: ‘My 20km record has been held hostage’
Read The Guardian
In an exclusive interview, Asghari explains why she is battling Iranian authorities who denied her a record over ‘un-Islamic attire’
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Coach Jon Rudd: Ruta Meilutyte ‘can become all-time great’
See the BBC
Lithuanian Olympic gold medallist Ruta Meilutyte can become the greatest female breaststroke swimmer of all time, according to her coach Jon Rudd.
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CC photo #551: Pál racing past the Szczecin 2050 ad at Szczecin 2011
A photo from the LEN 2011 European Short Course Championships in Szczecin, Poland. Faroe Island’s Pál Joensen racing past the Szczecin Project 2050 ad during warmup on the last day of the meet.
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Ian Thorpe looking forward to the 25th Bosphorus Cross-Continental Swim
Read GiveMeSportThe former Australian free-style swimmer Ian Thorpe is heading to one of the world’s greatest open water swimming competitions – the Bosphorus Cross-Continental Swim.
Thorpedo, who has set numerous world records throughout his glittering swimming career, stated his excitement at being involved in the event via Twitter.
Excited about heading to #Istanbul next week to celebrate the 25th Bosphorus Cross-Continental Swim @2kita1yaris #NOTC
— Ian Thorpe (@IanThorpe) June 28, 2013
Image courtesy of xiaming, CC BY-SA 3.0
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CC photo #550: Jennie Johansson before the Debrecen 2012 women’s 100 breast final
Sweden’s Jennie Johansson focusing before the women’s 100 meter breaststroke final at the LEN 2012 European Swimming Championships in Debrecen, Hungary. She won silver behind Germany’s Sarah Poewe, see the result list here.
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Wahoo Swim Bands detect if a swimmer has been under for too long
See story on KSTP.com and wahoosms.comIt looks like a headband and if a child that’s wearing one gets in trouble- parents and lifeguards will know.
If a child is submerged for 20 seconds, a light flashes on a tower. If a child is under for 30 seconds or more, an alarm goes off.
A YMCA in Connecticut paid $30,000 to install the system at their swimming pond. The makers of the technology say it’s especially helpful in murky water.
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Harrison Okene’s survival story presents intriguing physics puzzle
Physicists intrigued by the story that 29-year-old Harrison Okene survived being trapped in a 4 feet high air pocket for 60 hours underwater off the Nigerian coast, see phys.org and StackExchangeOkene was trapped in a capsized boat with an air bubble described as only 4 feet high. Normally, a person would need about 1,000 cubic feet of atmospheric air to survive 60 hours. At a depth of 100 feet, this volume would be compressed by a factor of about 4 by the water pressure, so theoretically an air pocket with dimensions 6x6x6 feet would contain enough oxygen to survive for that time.
It’s not the lack of oxygen but poisoning by the exhaled carbon dioxide that would first kill the person in this situation. However, the physics of interaction of atmospheric gases with water could make a critical difference in this case. Carbon dioxide is very soluble in water (much more so than nitrogen and oxygen), and its absorption by the water could have been the reason why carbon dioxide did not build up to the lethal concentration of about 5 percent.
“This man was lucky to survive mainly because a sufficiently large amount of trapped air was in his air pocket,” Umansky said. “He was not poisoned by the CO2 after 60 hours spent there, because it stayed at safe levels, and we can speculate that it was helped by the ocean water sealing his enclosure.”
