What Does A Mercedes-Benz Car And A Chicken Have In Common? #RandomWednesday
Move over Cat, it's the Chicken's turn to shine.
By Mei Mei Chu — 27 Nov 2013, 02:30 PM — Updated over 10 years ago
WATCH: Mercedes-Benz's new TV commercial was EGGSactly what we needed for a good cluck
Why the chickens?
The reason is a quirk in the anatomy of chickens which means they can keep their heads still, even when their bodies are moving – the perfect analogy for a complex computer system which offsets the vehicle's movements for a smoother ride.
This natural movement of a chicken to keep its head still is called "head tracking"
This well-known aviary mechanism is called head tracking, and Mercedes-Benz is using it to demonstrate how comfortable drivers will be in its cars.
What's being illustrated here is a behavior known as the vestibulo-ocular reflex, which allows animals to isolate the movement of their eyes from the movement of their bodies, stabilizing their vision.
cnet.comIn the case of the chicken, the reflex also isolates the movement of its entire head, allowing the birds to keep their skulls remarkably stationary even as their bodies are moved, lifted, and tilted about.
cnet.comThe next time you call someone a "Chicken Brain", think twice
The chicken's body communicates its movements so well with her head, that she can almost instantaneously compensate for her movement of the lower body, and keep her head stationary in relation to her environment. To do this, her body has to have some fixed point, some center, and determine how far her bum has moved away it, then move her head an equal but opposite distance from it. Once again this requires very rapid communication, and then action, on the part of her body.
This is also an interesting lesson in relativity. Her head is definitely not moving in relation to the background; we can clearly see that it remains at the same coordinates. But in relation to her own body, her head is moving. When her body is dropped down low, her neck stretches out, moving her head further away from her heart. When her body is lifted up, her neck shrinks down, moving her head closer to her heart. Her head moves an equal distance, but in the opposite direction, to the rest of her. She is compensating for the motion of her body, in order to keep the orientation of her head and her environment the same.
We're seeing a trend of cool car ads these days:
So the internet is raging about Van Damme's epic split done between 2 reversing Volvo trucks.. as well as Rob Ford's #VanFord parody of this mother of all splits. We at SAYS, however, found that this stunt was done by a Bollywood star many years ago... [CLICK ON LINK FOR VIDEO]
bit.ly
