Plummeting falcons stay in control.New techniques of measurement are revealing how a gyrfalcon gyrfalcon Arctic bird of prey (Falco rusticolus), the largest falcon. It may reach 2 ft (60 cm) in length. It breeds only in the North Pole region (and in some Central Asian highlands) but is sometimes seen at lower latitudes when food is scarce. sky dives Verb 1. sky dive - jump from an airplane and perform various maneuvers before opening one's parachute skydive chute, parachute, jump - jump from an airplane and descend with a parachute without ending up as a splat See asterisk. 1. splat - Name used in many places (DEC, IBM, and others) for the asterisk ("*") character (ASCII 0101010). This may derive from the "squashed-bug" appearance of the asterisk on many early line printers. 2. of feathers. Gyrfalcons plunge at speeds up to 58 meters per second (130 mph), report Vance A. Tucker at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and his colleagues. That's faster than any earlier method could measure reliably, he says. Tucker followed falcon dives with a telescope hitched to computerized instruments. The bird started as a dark speck more than a quarter of a mile up and, when called, shot down to falconer Falconer prison where former professor Farragut, who had killed his brother, witnesses the torments and chaos of the penal system. [Am. Lit.: Cheever Falconer in Weiss, 151] See : Imprisonment Tom J. Cade at the Peregrine Fund in Boise, Idaho “Boise” redirects here. For other uses, see Boise (disambiguation). Boise is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Idaho. It is the county seat of Ada County and the principal city of the Boise metropolitan area. . "It's one of the most remarkable sights," Tucker says. Details were posted online June 11 in the Journal of Experimental Biology. "You can take a chicken and drop it out of an airplane, and it's going to go awfully fast," he points out. Although he had expected falcons to show more finesse than falling chickens, he was surprised to see three distinct stages of descent: acceleration, then controlled, steady dropping, and finally braking. "It decelerates faster than you [could] in your car in a panic stop," he says. |
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