Category Archives: science

Super Shoes

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Kelvin Kiptum Nike shoes Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images)

This autumn, Ethiopia’s Tigst Assefa broke the woman’s world marathon record. She took just 2 hours 11 minutes and 53 seconds – which is 2 minutes and 11 seconds less than the record set previously 4 years ago. That is a whopping amount of time she was able to shave off. Not surprisingly, it raised eyebrows. How was it possible to run so fast? Some commentators put it down to the trainers she was wearing that gave her the advantage – the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1. Not long after, the Kenyan long-distance runner Kelvin Kiptum broke the man’s world record time, wearing the latest Nike Alphafly 3 trainers (see left). So, what is it about these new kinds of super shoe that literally make an athlete run like the wind?

A big step change is the way they are made up and the materials used for this. This has enabled a new thick but lightweight structure to be built in the sole of the shoe. The way the layers of material are engineered seems to give the runners that extra spring. They also have added a stiff rod in the midsole that is made of carbon, which helps the shoe keep its shape. The Alphaflys also have a curved geometry in the sole that has been designed to propel runners forward. Taken together, they are truly a step up from previous running shoes. A marathon runner who was interviewed in an article in the Guardian on the super shoes said “on average I reckon that they are worth four minutes for a top male in a marathon.” And the proof is in the tumbling records this year.

But is it fair?

Technology has been developed for years to improve all manner of artefacts, clothing and equipment that are used in sport – including tennis racquets, cricket bats, racing cars and racing bikes. It is par of the course in sport innovation. But some ruling bodies see it as unfair and needs to be stopped in its tracks. For example, back in 2009 a new kind of high-tech super swimsuit developed by Speedo was banned by the swimming’s governing body on the grounds that it gave certain swimmers an advantage, and in so doing, was ruining the sport. The full body swimsuit was made from polyurethane which can trap air in the suit and increase buoyancy to the swimmer making it faster to swim.

The LZR Racer Suit unveiling at a press conference in New York City in February 2008. From wikipedia

Another concern is its impact on the past. Many world records from years gone by are being broken, especially those that were made by great sportsmen and women, who have since become legends. They did not have the same kind of high-tech super shoes, etc., then, so it is considered unfair to take away their crowning glories by those who have the super shoes, swimsuits, etc..

But records are there to be broken. And speed and innovation go hand in hand.

Another line of argument is that giving sportspeople these new kind of superpowers is equivalent to doping which entail taking certain kinds of drugs to improve fitness. But the big difference between doping and super tech is that the former is an internal enhancer while the later is an external aid. While both can improve speed, doping goes one step further by invisibly enhancing an athlete’s stamina which is especially important in endurance and long distance sports. The various substances, like EPO, used in doping increase the taker’s red blood cell count, enabling more oxygen to be transported around the body and to the muscles, thereby increasing stamina. No-one questions whether this should be banned because not only can they give certain athletes an unfair advantage, they can be dangerous, causing health issues. It is also difficult to see how much someone has taken and for how long so it is a very unfair playing ground.

Super shoes, on the other hand can be checked to see if they fit certain regulations. The same could potentially be true for full body swimsuits (they still remain banned from the ruling of 2009).

Ten years ago Google developed a concept shoe that could talk to the wearer to motivate them to get up and go. It was long before chatGPT had arrived. In the near future it might be the case that the super shoe could be embedded with a GenAI app so that it could talk to the runner like in the video – helping them keep going in the way trainers and spectators currently do from the sidelines. Now that would be truly super.

 

Numbing numbers

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A part of my work involves advising various companies and government bodies about their future technology research strategies. This week, I had the pleasure of visiting the EPSRC headquarters in Swindon for a two-day meeting. Besides being super excited about meeting up with other members of the scientific advisory team for the first time in 3D (many of whom I had only met as digital postage stamps during the past 3 years), we were also invited to tour various facilities at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in nearby Didcot. I was assigned to a small group that went to see the Diamond Light Source. Sounds like a big laser show but it is in fact a massive science centre. On entering the building we were shown a model of the building to see what is inside. From an aerial view, it reminded me of Apple’s latest donut campus – in terms of its shape, scale and size.

This huge set up enables a laser beam to whiz around a circuit at some unbelievable speed that has the effect of giving off light 10 billion times brighter than the sun. The mind boggles at what that actually means in practice. Of course you never get to actually see the beam racing around the donut but I was mightily impressive to know it was hurtling around while we mere mortals were walking tentatively around the place. What you do see are various numbers, graphs and images in the nerve centre that lets you know what it is up to.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The shining beam is siphoned off into lots of little labs where teams of scientists use it to study all manner of topics, including fossils, jet engines and vaccines. In a nutshell, it is a ginormous microscope that allows lots of measurements to be taken during millions of experimental trials. The scientists and engineers we were introduced to, who work on site, told us how having such a powerful magnifying beam enables them to do incredible science. Making the invisible visible in all sorts of unknown ways. However, they all also mentioned that the data that is collected from the various beam runs is so massive, that outside researchers who come to run their experiments at the facility, nowadays can’t cart their data home with them because there is simply too much of it. Instead, the data has to be stored and analysed on site before a digested form is sent back to them. A few years ago they could save it all onto a portable hard drive…

So what do scientists do with this ever growing mountain of data? How do they count it, describe it and then importantly, work out how to turn it into new knowledge? While data scientists may revel in this sea of data, other kinds of scientists often find it somewhat overwhelming, to put it mildly. To help them in their quest, every now and again, the ‘numbers’ community come up with new names to  make it more manageable to describe it. Just this month, the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures introduced some new names (or prefixes, cf. milli- to be precise). These included talking about data in terms of being a ronna which has 27 zeroes after the first digit or a quetta which has 30 zeroes after the first digit.

So how would you use these funny number names to talk about science? Consider the mass of the sun. Previously it was talked about in terms of 2,000,000,000 yottagrams. Now its mass can be said to be 2,000 quettagrams. To me it all sounds a bit double-dutch but to data scientists it provides a new and hopefully more meaningful way of expressing huge quantities of digital information.

Coming up with new data words must be one of the fun parts of the job. I wondered how did they choose them this time?  What were they thinking of? Ronna is also a girl’s name meaning “rough island and true image”, while a Quetta is a fort and is the tenth most populous city in Pakistan! And what will replace the ronnas and quettas to express the ever growing volumes of data that will have accumulated in the next 5-10 years? What new words will be dreamt up?  Perhaps Tom Lehrer should get in on the act. I am reminded of his classic song, The Elements, from 1956. Makes me laugh every time I hear it.

Thanks to John Collomosse for taking the photos inside the Diamond.