Scooter companies like Bird and Lime do not currently provide helmets for their riders. A recent UCLA study shows riders without helmets suffer the worst injuries.
Read the restDuring a year of study, doctors identified 249 people who were admitted for scooter-related injuries. They did this by looking through medical records and identifying any that contained notes with the word "scooter," or that mentioned Bird or Lime — the top two operators in the market.
The study found "helmet use was low and a significant subset of injuries" were documented in patients under 18, which is the legal age required by scooter operators to ride.
Researchers also studied scooter riders' habits by observing a pair of "busy intersections" in Sept. 2018 — one in downtown Santa Monica, the other near UCLA's campus.
The vast majority of riders (94 percent) didn't wear helmets, which were required under California law during the period of study, though they no longer are. Nearly 8 percent were riding with a passenger, which is a violation of the vehicles terms of use (and local law). More than a quarter of the observed riders were seen zipping along on the sidewalk, which is also prohibited.
Last week, our lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent a reply to Bird, the scooter company, which had sent us an intimidating letter seeking to censor this post on Bird conversion kits, which let you unlock the hundreds of Bird scooters that are auctioned off by cities after Bird fails to claim them from their impound lots. Read the rest
Last month, I published a post discussing the mountains of abandoned Bird Scooters piling up in city impound lots, and the rise of $30 Chinese conversion kits that let you buy a scooter at auction, swap out the motherboard, and turn it into a personal scooter, untethered from the Bird company. Read the rest
When scooter companies like Bird started illegally deploying their gadgets in city streets, there was intense interest in both the street value of the components to be found within each of these VC-backed ewaste-in-waiting devices, and tactics for hotwiring them. Read the rest
San Francisco's giant fleet of semi-illegal electric scooters have come to symbolize the tech industry's worst excesses, inspiring all kinds of creative resistance Read the rest
Sharp-eyed ornithologists noticed that some specimens of Vogelkop Superb Bird-of-Paradise that they observed looked different enough that they may be a separate species. They captured video of the other kind for comparison. Read the rest
Did you know a baby peacock is called a peachick? I didn't until I started writing this post up. I'm not even sure I had ever even seen a baby peacock, er peachick, before in my life. This peachick's name is Drew and he was rescued by the folks at Hairy Farmpit Girls in White Oak, Georgia. Last week, they captured him strutting around with his new big-bird feathers for the first time and it's really, really cute.
"Drew was thrown in a garbage can out in Douglas, Georgia," Jennifer Evitts, owner of Hairy Farmpit Girls... "Someone saw what happened, grabbed him and then reached out to us to see if we would take him as she didn't know what to do with him."
...In addition to providing a safe haven for abused or neglected animals, the farm sells a range of goat milk-based products, from soap to lotion to lip balm, to support their cause.
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On the occasion of Bird being ordered to remove its scooters from the streets of San Francisco, JWZ has published the beginnings of a costed teardown of the key components of any you find lying around after they become illegal litter: Read the rest
It's long been known that birds possess magnetoreception, or ability to sense earth's magnetic fields. Now researchers are narrowing down a specific eye protein called Cry4 that appears to allow birds to sense magnetic waves in the presence of blue light. Read the rest
Artist Kathleen Darby takes viewers through her step-by-step process of drawing a colorful bird on black paper. Start at the beginning for more details. It's interesting as well as relaxing, as there are some important differences when starting from negative space. Read the rest
Finnish photographer Ossi Saarinen has gotten quite adept at taking photos of birds facing directly to camera, making each bird look adorably round, like the cute shot above. Read the rest
Researcher Melanie Barboni studies geology for a living, but as a side gig, she is known as The Hummingbird Whisperer Read the rest
A woman shares this video of her rainbow lorikeet “hissing with me in perfect synchrony.”
YouTube user Margara Francis uploaded this delightful video of a bird enjoying the hell out of a moving sidewalk at the airport. In fact, the bird likes the trip so much, he flies back to take it all over again.
If you happen to have a Pacific parrotlet who happens to be patient, and you happen to have a couple of spare feathers lying around, you might try this trick to turn it into a rabbit. Read the rest
Design student Sugko at Sejong University used a CymaScope to visualize bird songs, with beautiful results. Read the rest
