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Besides adding accuracy, Seay says, computer-aided design "allows the engineer to be more creative because he can
model his ideas." But as coasters get more extreme, critics claim health risks such as brain injury also escalate.
Ride engineers counter that coasters are designed within guidelines established by studies on NASA astronauts, jet
pilots and crash-test dummies, which determine the maximum forces people can withstand. In Popular Mechanics's
August 2003 cover story, scientists sided with coaster engineers--and they still do. Douglas Smith, a University of
Pennsylvania neurologist, developed a model that analyzes how a person's head would rotate during a ride--combined
with rapid acceleration and deceleration, this rotation causes most brain injuries--then input the g-forces from
three coasters. "The head rotational accelerations were nowhere near the thresholds we know cause injury," Smith
says. He recently repeated the study, this time outfitting riders with sensors that measured head acceleration in
three planes; Smith says preliminary data supports his original findings. Neurologist Gary O'Shanick, chair of a
panel tasked with determining if coasters can cause brain trauma, says the risk lies in the rider, not in the ride,
so only people with pre-existing conditions may be prone to injury. Fahrenheit will undergo extensive safety
testing when it's complete. "We'll have run a thousand rides before anyone gets on it," Bachmann says. Water-filled
dummies weighing 175 pounds each will show how the trains behave at capacity.
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