
What will happen when an ant falls from the Empire State Building - palerdot
https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2016/6/15/11936802/ant-dropped-from-empire-state-building-science-experiment-mystery-solved
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TeMPOraL
Much more fun exploration of the same topic (includes throwing ants from
airplanes) by Kurzgesagt:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7KSfjv4Oq0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7KSfjv4Oq0).

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thunderbong
Thanks for that! I got carried away and sank an hour watching stuff.

Totally off topic - My favourite was 'Optimistic Nihilism' \-
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBRqu0YOH14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBRqu0YOH14)

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alejohausner
Whenever I remove ants from the kitchen, I grab them gently between my
fingers, to keep them from escaping. Otherwise, they will often jump out of my
hands.

I'm sure that 5 feet is long enough to reach ant terminal velocity. So clearly
ants know that falling 5 feet, or 1000 feet, is no big deal.

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Johnny555
I think they just know that getting away from the monstrous predator is better
than getting eaten by it, and so they escape without regard to the size of the
leap. If you did the same experiment with your hand held out over the ocean,
I'm sure they'd make the same leap, only to drown in the water.

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jazoom
I wish our ants were like yours. If I clean up a bunch of them there are
likely to be a few that ran onto my hand keep running around my hand. Easiest
way is to wash them off. I've never had an ant choose to jump from me.

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ada1981
I didnt know that below a certain size, gravity won’t kill you.

The idea a mouse can survive a fall into a thousand foot mineshaft is quite
wonderful.

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TomK32
For cats it's better to fall off a higher floor than a lower one because they
have more time to turn feet down and increase their air drag thus getting
under the terminal velocity and allow them to survive the fall.

For humans a jump from the third floor is where safe ticket to afterlife
start, though head first will end it just as fine from the second or even
first floor.

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tvmalsv
> For cats it's better to fall off a higher floor than a lower one because
> they have more time to turn feet down and increase their air drag thus
> getting under the terminal velocity and allow them to survive the fall.

True, and there's been at least one, probably many, actual study done that
came to that conclusion.

Small nitpick (I'm sorry, I couldn't stop myself!), their action doesn't get
them "under the terminal velocity," it lowers what their terminal velocity is.
It's just the speed at which the wind resistance is enough to prevent further
acceleration by gravity. It's terminal as in the end of something
(acceleration), not terminal as in the predicted death of the something.

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TomK32
Thanks for the nitpicking, English isn't my native tongue.

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daxfohl
If air pressure was a factor then you would see tons of dead ants littering
elevator floors.

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saghm
I'm glad we live in a reality where this isn't the case

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slededit
I don't think the final paragraph on why it wouldn't pop is a compelling
argument. While I don't actually think the ant would explode - saying some
ants live on mountains is not an argument against it. The explosion would
occur from the change in pressure, not the absolute pressure.

The real reason is that the small size of an ant makes an effective pressure
vessel and the differential is simply not very high. Some species of spiders
which actually operate their legs pneumatically are known to fly across oceans
high in the air with their silk as a sail.

[1] [https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/04/europe/spiders-sail-fly-
ballo...](https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/04/europe/spiders-sail-fly-
balloon/index.html)

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jws
TL;DR – article is just click fodder. Ants have a safe terminal velocity and
probably won't pop in the elevator on the way up from pressure changes, but no
experiments were performed.

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bjelkeman-again
Mu guess would have been that it would have ended up in the water swept away
by the winds, on a windy day.

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sjmulder
What's the point of adding such a massive cookie bar, supposedly for the GDRP,
if there's no way to say no? If they don't need/want to be compliant, why have
it at all?

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ojosilva
Funny, 5 minutes ago I've made this exact call in our website: remove the
reject button.

Unfortunately, and for the time being, we are not able to give users an
alternative, no-cookie version of our website. And we didn't have a good place
to send them to when Reject was clicked. history.back() appeared to be the
best option but unreliable. So we first replaced it with the legalese
equivalent of "close the tab/leave if you don't agree" but it looks like even
that is assumed to be implicitly understood by the visitor, so TBH I'm not
sure what's the best compromise between usability and compliance.

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freehunter
Unfortunately I don't think "accept tracking or don't use the site" is in
compliance with GDPR. There's some specific language in there about the site
needing to be useable even if users don't give permissions to anything that's
not 100% necessary for site functionality.

