Funmurphys: the Blog

Physics and Heavenly Bodies

Speaking of good work if you can get it:

To best support breasts, a designer has to understand how they move. To that end, McGhee's team in Australia, headed by biomechanist Julie Steele, tags women with light-emitting diodes and asks them to run on treadmills. (The women run with and without bras, so the laboratory doors are bolted to prevent uninvited people from bursting in.) Computer systems then track the breasts' motions in three dimensions by following the moving lights. "We can actually work out exactly where they're going, how they're moving, and how this movement is affected by bras," Steele says. Breasts move in a sinusoidal pattern, Steele has found, and they move a lot. Small breasts can move more than three inches vertically during a jog, and large breasts sometimes leave their bras entirely. "We have videos of women who, particularly if the cup is too low, spill all over the top," Steele says.

Too bad Victoria's Secret wasn't hiring engineers back when I got out of college!

If you can get past the snicker factor, it really is an interesting article on the physics of bras, at least for me as it combines two of my favorite subjects.

But there is a more controversial part to the article

Evolutionary biologists aren't sure why breasts evolved as they did—chimpanzees and other mammals develop them only when lactating—and no one knows what keeps them from sagging.

I'm sure the Intellegent Design people will be all over this to show female breasts prove that there really is a God. I'm waiting for the evolutionists to counter claim that women were once endowed with something even more delightful but they changed into breasts and that's why it only appears as if there is no point to them from an evolutionary point of view.

Posted by Kevin Murphy at November 3, 2005 12:04 PM | Fun | Science