Lately there has been an increase in brain injuries. Medical professionals and brain injury lawyers have noted an increase in clientele with head traumas. Throughout the world, legislation is being enacted to help protect children who experience an injury when playing sports. Many have to leave a sporting game if injured and must seek medical attention. Professional sporting organizations, such as the NFL, are looking into head traumas and ways to adequately protect their players. Scientists now believe that the answer may lie in the woodpecker.

Researchers have concluded that the anatomy of the bird and its behavior may help them in efforts to design new helmets with greater efficiency of protecting from injury. Woodpeckers, as we all know, peck at wood. However, they do so at highly intense speeds, resulting in “intense deceleration forces on impact”, and do not sustain any type of trauma to the brain. Therefore a team of researchers in China, directed by Ming Zhang of Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Yubo Fan of Beihang University in Beijing, have set forth to intensely study the bird.

The group has set up multiple high speed cameras to capture the movement of the woodpeckers. Additionally the workers took scans of their heads to discover things like the volume of their bones, density and thickness. From their photos they grafted 3D models which aided with further research efforts.

So far it has been revealed that, ” specific details of the cranial bones and beak – such as the relative “spongy”-ness of the bone at different places in the skull and the unequal lengths of the upper and lower parts of the beak – were crucial for preventing impact injury.”