Segway boss Jimi Heselden dies in scooter cliff fall

The millionaire owner of the Segway company has died after falling from cliffs while riding one of his firm’s motorised scooters.

Jimi Heselden, 62, crashed into the River Wharfe while riding the vehicle round his estate in Thorp Arch, Boston Spa, West Yorkshire, on Sunday.

He was pronounced dead at the scene. The scooter was found in the water.

Mr Heselden, who founded Leeds-based company Hesco Bastion, acquired the Segway operation in December 2009.

The devices are electric, two-wheeled, self-balancing machines. They were invented by Dean Kamen and unveiled in 2001.

A family spokesman said Mr Heselden was a “much-loved father and husband”.

A spokeswoman for West Yorkshire Police said: “Police were called at 1140 yesterday to reports of a man in the River Wharfe, apparently having fallen from the cliffs above.”

‘Tragic accident’

Mr Heselden grew up in the Halton Moor area of Leeds, leaving school at 15 and working down local pits.

He worked as a miner until losing his job in a wave of redundancies in the 1980s.

His engineering business, which produces military and flood protection equipment, went from strength-to-strength and he had a fortune reported to be £166m, making him one of the top 400 richest people in the UK.

The tycoon was well known for his donations to charity, giving more than £20m to good causes.

In 2009 Mr Heselden, who leaves a wife and children, led a British team which bought the United States-based Segway firm.

A family spokesman said: “Our family has been left devastated by the sudden and tragic loss of a much-loved father and husband.”

A spokesman for Hesco Bastion said: “It is with great sadness that we have to confirm that Jimi Heselden OBE has died in a tragic accident near his home in West Yorkshire.”

The spokesman added: “Jimi is perhaps best known for his charity work with Help for Heroes and the Leeds Community Foundation.

‘Selfless and generous’

“A £10m gift to the foundation earlier this month saw his lifetime charitable donations top £23m.

“Our thoughts go out to his family and many friends.”

Tom Riordan, chief executive of Leeds City Council, said: “Jimi was an amazing man who, apart from being a wonderful success story for Leeds due to his business acumen, was also remarkably selfless and generous, giving millions to local charities to help people in his home city.”

He added that Mr Heselden would be remembered for his “quiet manner, good nature and tremendous pride in being from Leeds”.

via BBC News – Segway boss Jimi Heselden dies in scooter cliff fall.

Could magnet on head turn you from right to left-handed?

Placing a magnet on your head can temporarily turn you from a right-hander to a left-handed person, a new study suggests.

In an extraordinary experiment researchers used a powerful magnetic field to temporarily confuse the brains of volunteers and change their hand preferences.

The effects lasted only while the magnet was switched on and appears to have caused no lasting changes.

But the experiment sheds light on the origins of hand choice in the brain and highlights once again how easy it is to alter people’s behaviour with magnets.

Earlier this year, a similar study showed that magnetic therapy can alter people’s moral judgements – and make them behave more thoughtlessly.

The new study looked at how the brain decides which hand to use for a simple task, such as picking up a pencil or pressing the button on a lift.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, asked right-handed volunteers to reach with either hand towards an object on a table.

They then disrupted the volunteer’s brain using a powerful hand-held magnet used in a type of therapy called transcranial magnetic stimulation.

The magnet generates a magnetic field on a small part of the skull which creates weak electric currents in the brain. The currents interfere with nearby brain cells and prevent them from firing normally.

The magnet was placed next to the left and right ‘posterior parietal cortex’ – a region that deals with planning and working out the relationship between three dimensional objects.

When the magnet was placed on the left side of the brain region, the volunteers used their left hand more frequently than when the magnet was switched off.

Applying the magnet to the right side of the region made no difference, the scientists report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr Flavio Oliveira, who led the study, said: ‘We are not really looking at handedness, but at hand choice. We found that in situations where people are almost equally likely to use their left or right hand we can make them use their left hand more by stimulating this part of the brain.

‘Before you reach out to press an elevator button or grab a coffee cup your brain is making a decision about which hand to use. We are handicapping one of the hands so that the other one wins.’

Earlier this year, scientists discovered a real-life ‘moral compass’ in the brain that controls how we judge other people’s behaviour.

The region, which lies just behind the right ear, becomes more active when we think about other people’s misdemeanours or good works.

In an experiment, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were able to use powerful magnets to disrupt this area of the brain and make people temporarily less moral.

The study highlighted how our sense of right and wrong isn’t just based on upbringing, religion or philosophy – but by the biology of our brains.

via Could magnet on head turn you from right to left-handed? | Mail Online.

Atheists, agnostics most knowledgeable about religion, survey says

If you want to know about God, you might want to talk to an atheist.

Heresy? Perhaps. But a survey that measured Americans’ knowledge of religion found that atheists and agnostics knew more, on average, than followers of most major faiths. In fact, the gaps in knowledge among some of the faithful may give new meaning to the term “blind faith.”

A majority of Protestants, for instance, couldn’t identify Martin Luther as the driving force behind the Protestant Reformation, according to the survey, released Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Four in 10 Catholics misunderstood the meaning of their church’s central ritual, incorrectly saying that the bread and wine used in Holy Communion are intended to merely symbolize the body and blood of Christ, not actually become them.

Atheists and agnostics — those who believe there is no God or who aren’t sure — were more likely to answer the survey’s questions correctly. Jews and Mormons ranked just below them in the survey’s measurement of religious knowledge — so close as to be statistically tied.

So why would an atheist know more about religion than a Christian?

American atheists and agnostics tend to be people who grew up in a religious tradition and consciously gave it up, often after a great deal of reflection and study, said Alan Cooperman, associate director for research at the Pew Forum.

“These are people who thought a lot about religion,” he said. “They’re not indifferent. They care about it.”

Atheists and agnostics also tend to be relatively well educated, and the survey found, not surprisingly, that the most knowledgeable people were also the best educated. However, it said that atheists and agnostics also outperformed believers who had a similar level of education.

The groups at the top of the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey were followed, in order, by white evangelical Protestants, white Catholics, white mainline Protestants, people who were unaffiliated with any faith (but not atheist or agnostic), black Protestants and Latino Catholics.

Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists were included in the survey, but their numbers were too small to be broken out as statistically significant groups.

via Atheists, agnostics most knowledgeable about religion, survey says – latimes.com.

Noise and chemicals: Workers are losing their hearing

A study carried out by Spanish researchers has shown that the presence of chemical contaminants can interact with noise and modify, for good or for bad, the way in which work-related “deafness” – which is increasingly common among young people – manifests itself. Noise-related hearing loss is the most common occupational disease in Europe.”Workers exposed to noise in the presence of metalworking fluids exhibit a delay in hearing alteration in comparison with those exposed only to noise at the same intensity. However, those exposed to noise in the presence of welding fumes experience increased hearing alteration”, Juan Carlos Conte, lead author of the study and a researcher at the University of Zaragoza, tells SINC.

In the study, published in Anales del Sistema Sanitario de Navarra, the team analysed the way in which various physical and chemical contaminants interact, and the impact this had on hearing alteration in 558 metal workers

“A problem we detected with respect to welding fumes in the presence of noise was that the protection used is effective for reducing the intensity of noise, but not for reducing the effects of the chemical contaminant”, Conte explains.

Cellulose masks or others made of similar compounds have little effect in this case, since their capacity to filter particles (such as charcoal) has no effect on toxic gas molecules (such as carbon monoxide).

However, in noisy atmospheres with metalworking fluids, people have the advantage of being able to use masks as respiratory protection, although the ear protection must be used in the same way to ensure that a person is comprehensively protected from noise.

The researchers point to other factors in work-related hearing loss. For example, tobacco contributes to the acquisition of initial acoustic trauma, while exposure to noise outside the work environment also impacts on advanced acoustic injury. …

via Noise and chemicals: Workers are losing their hearing.