Paper cycling helmet wins James Dyson Award

SmartCars have to pass the same safety standards as Ford F150s. Which one would you feel safer in?

> If folded paper could absorb impact, that's what a real helmet would have in it.

That's analogous to saying that if the polio vaccine could vaccinate users from polio, that's what would have been administered already. The whole point of this is that it's a potentially new innovation, which implies it is something the helmet industry hasn't yet developed.

Who are these people that think a helmet is impractical to carry? You also have to leave your bike somewhere everywhere you go, isn't that inconvenient too?

I rode a bike for 2 years in downtown Toronto, wearing a helmet the entire time, and never once did I think that the helmet was inconvenient. You carry it up to your office and leave it on your desk. Or you turn it upside down and it's an adhoc shopping basket. Or you clip it to your backpack. Or you loop it through your bike lock.

There are a million ways to answer the "inconvenience" problem that don't involve wearing a pseudo-helmet.

It's not impractical at all. You clip it to your backpack. That's what I did in college, and if I wanted to ride a city bike in a big city, that's what I'd do there too. Every time I go into a walkable big city like NYC, I'm carrying my backpack with me since it's the most practical way to carry a bunch of stuff including my laptop. Clipping my bike helmet to it would be trivial.

How does cycling well prevent someone else from colliding with me? At least in the US, cars and bikes share the same roads, and there's not much one can do while cycling to prevent cars from injuring cyclists.

Wearing a helmet can be demonstrated to be more effective in terms of number of lives saved by being worn by pedestrians and motorists, rather than cyclists. Are you saying that we should all wear helmets when out in public?

>Broken bones heal.

I agree with your sentiment about the relative differences between broken bones and head injuries, but this statement isn't completely correct: if you're an adult, a broken bone almost always leaves behind some kind of problem, usually at a minimum the tendency to have arthritis at the point of fracture later on. Broken bones don't heal perfectly, just like significant cuts will always leave a scar in your skin.

Hopefully medical technology will figure out soon how to fix this, and make it so we can regenerate like those animals that regrow tails and limbs, but not yet.

Well that helmet looks pretty ugly and has no venting. This paper-board honeycomb helmet looks better and is well vented.

I respectfully agree with 2 out of 3 of those adjectives :)

at any time a vehicle could plough into you while you're walking on the pavement

The moderators sometimes change links to point the original source (linking to the original source is one of the HN guidelines). Particularly where the link is blogspam based on a more informative source.

Enormous amounts of testing prove that those "tiny" helmets do in fact help a lot. Cyclists aren't normally exposed to the magnitude of forces that motorcyclists are in crashes, due to their lower speeds, but they're still exposed to speeds well above those that are normal for human bodies to be propelled at, and in an environment surrounded with very hard, unnatural surfaces (concrete, asphalt), so the forces they can experience are well above those the human skull is designed to protect.

I had a friend in college who worked in a university lab testing bike helmets; this was 20 years ago now. They're only gotten better since then.

But it's true, bicycling helmets don't do much for protecting your face. But that's not what they're designed for; they're designed to reduce or prevent brain injuries from knocking your skull on the road or a curb. A full-face motorcycle helmet would be even better, but there's a tradeoff there in weight and ventilation (and cost), things that are more important to bicyclists than motorcyclists. Even a lot of motorcycle helmets aren't full-face and don't protect the face at all. But the idea with safety equipment isn't to completely eliminate all possible injury, it's to reduce risk to a reasonable degree; for the injuries you're likely to experience as a cyclist, a good cycling helmet is designed to protect against those. But it's not going to help keep a branch from poking your eye out on a backwoods trail.

Finally, the charge against bike helmets from all these anti-helmet people lately isn't that they don't help prevent injuries (they absolutely do), it's that they allegedly cause more accidents by making car drivers more reckless around cyclists. The claim has nothing to do with physics, and everything to do with psychology. Personally, I think it's a terrible argument to make, and if there's any truth to it, it simply shows that we absolutely need to mandate that cyclists are provided with physically separate roads from cars. Considering how dirt-cheap cycling trails are to build compared to car-roads, how much better for the environment cycling is than driving in cars, and how much public health would be improved by more cycling (which would reduce healthcare expenditures greatly, and also improve workplace productivity and reduce sick time, all important factors for good capitalists), there's simply no excuse for governments to not be buildings lots and lots of safe cycling paths and encouraging cycling.