With only a few weeks to go until the opening ceremony of the Olympics the hot topic in our ‘Ask a Sports Engineer’ question box this week was about the Olympics and the importance of the event. History The Olympics originally started as a series of competitions between representatives from cities in Ancient Greece. The […]
Yesterday, the Sunday Times reported that some professional tennis players (allegedly) spray their strings with silicon to help them generate spin (Link to report in The Australian due to Times’ paywall). Spin plays an important role in Tennis, top-spin generates a vertical force which cause the ball to dip, this allows a player to keep […]
Introduction Four years ago Usain Bolt from Jamaica was pretty much unknown, but since then he has become, arguably, the most famous athlete in the world. In 2010 I wrote an article attempting to predict how far he would jump in the long jump. The fame surrounding Bolt is so great that this article quickly […]
Professor Haake has been working with the Royal Institution on a series of films exploring the world of sport, technology and engineering. Not only that but they’ve launched with the very same name as our blog! The collection of films will be available soon, but for now you can get a taste by viewing the […]
“Is sport good for us” was the question posed to me for my first blog article for Engineering Sport. Not exactly an ‘easy ice breaker’, but I thought I’d have a good go at it. So, where to start? First, I think it’d be a good idea to differentiate (at least a little) between sport […]
This July sees the next biannual conference on Sports Engineering, held at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. The conference always has a lot of interesting papers on the subject of engineering and technology in sport. Thanks to the internet age, the papers at this conference are also available online for anyone to read. Before the […]
Our very own Dr David James has recently given a lecture exploring the role of technology in sport for the IET. They’ve made the video available online, which you can see by visiting the link below. Enabling, enhancing or cheating? Dr David James, Centre for Sports Engineering Research From: Sports Technology Lecture, 24 May 2012, […]
At the museum we have a great exhibit with two racing bikes along a simulated course; this has sparked a range of questions on the topic of cycling, from the physics of riding a bike to the most popular question; how can we cycle faster? How do we master the art of balancing on two […]
As something most of us will have wondered when swimming, the next blog post in our ‘ask a Sports Engineer!’ series looks at how long we’re able to hold our breath for underwater. Despite what most people would think, humans are actually quite well suited to being underwater, as after all, we spend the first […]
The very first question I thought I’d tackle in our ‘Ask a Sports Engineer’ project is quite a fundamental one and also quite different from the subjects we usually tackle on engineeringsport: What is Sport? A lot of the questions we’ve received from the question box asked questions very similar to this. Some people were […]
Engineering Sport 