Cheating Death with a Train

Nobody should be messing with trains. These huge, heavy, solid, and powerful people and cargo movers won’t stop for, and cannot be stopped by anything for it can crash through and rip everything that stands in its way. Just like those that you see in the movies. However, unlike in the movies where nobody really gets hurt or killed, in real life, a lot of people get injured and die because of train accidents every year.

There are many types of train accidents that have happened before. There are times when irresponsible motorists try to outrun trains by going through the railroad crossing even if the signals are up. There are also times when trains get derailed due to overloading, bad track conditions or extreme weather conditions, cases where you can file a train accident claim to get compensation for injuries and loss of lives. Finally, there are people who play around with trains without any logical reason at all. Just like this one person in the Bay Area.

Perfect Example of What One Should Not Follow

Weeks ago, a man crossed the railroad tracks of a Bay Area commuter train. This man has crossed the tracks just as when a train went rushing by. Yes, the train didn’t missed him and he is still very much alive. Doesn’t sound too dangerous to you right? Not until you’ve seen the video. Caltrain, a commuter rail serves that serves San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties released a video of pedestrians crossing the tracks at its Sequioa station in Redwood City. Even though warning sirens were off and a flashing crossing gate was alerting these pedestrians of an oncoming train, an unidentified man crossed the tracks, avoiding the train just by a few feet or inches—talking about a near miss!

Fire on Your Golf Clubs

You can normally hear sportscasters say that one athlete is “on fire”. Of course, these sportscasters don’t mean that literally. Such term can be heard if an athlete is playing unbelievably well. However, according to a study from the University of California-Irvine, some golf players can really set themselves on fire, literally with the golf club they are using.

Fire-starting Clubs

The recent spate of devastating fires on golf courses in Irvin and Mission Viejo got fire investigators thinking about what could have possibly started these fire incidents. To get into the bottom of this, they have seek the help of materials scientists to find definitive answers to these questions. The scientists then looked for leads and ended up looking at golfing equipment, particularly, golf clubs to find answers. And so the answers did come.

Based on the published findings by the journal ‘Fire and Materials’, the materials scientists found out that titanium-coated golf clubs can cause an ignition, and possibly, fire if it strikes small pebbles or rocks, igniting dry foliage. In the study, researchers simulated the conditions in the golf courses where fires happened. With the use of high-speed video as well as powerful scanning electron microscope analyses, the scientists tried to find out if they hypothesis was indeed right.