Why Do People Leave Kids In Hot Cars And What's To Be Done About It?

Most people who leave children in pets in hot cars are not
evil, science suggests. But the brain tricks them into doing
this. There's also prevention ideas out there. 

It's the peak of summer the most dangerous time of year for children and pets left alone in hot cars.

A few people who leave children and pets to die in cars under a hot sun are just evil people.  (I'll get to one of them in a minute.)  

Most of the people who leave kids and Fido in the car, though, are not awful at all, research shows.  Their brains actually conspire to cause trouble.

According to NBC News, if you fall into a routine, and something happens to disrupt that routine, you can forget something that's extremely important to you. Like your child.

It's just the way our brain is structured, Dr. David Diamond, a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida told NBC News.

Two competing parts of our brains come into play. There's the basal ganglia, the part that operates on a subconscious level, which allows us to store abilities like ride a bicycle or just generally go on autopilot as we complete routine activities.

Then there's the hippocampus, which is the part of our brain in which we learn new information and complete plans we've made.

Here's how this all relates to leaving kids in hot cars, says Diamond and NBC News:

"'When you drive home and don't normally take a child to daycare, when you have a habit and you are normally driving home from work - and in those subsets or maybe none at all take a child home - well, what happens in all those cases, the parent goes into autopilot mode, which is typically home to work. It's in that subset of cases of basal ganglia is taking you on a route that does not include a child.

In these cases, the child is quiet and out of sight, which causes the parent to lose awareness of the task they're out to do."

In other words, these parents are so used to a routine that when a child changes the routine and needs to be left off at daycare, your autopilot subconscious makes you forget the kid.  The brain has created a false memory in the parent of leaving the child at daycare. When actually the kid is still in the hot car. With tragic results.

To combat this, create another routine that you do on autopilot that forces you to check the whole car before you leave.

Always drop your shoe, briefcase or something important in the back seat so you're forced to check the back seat. Or create a routine to make your subconscious happy in which no matter when you leave the car, you open the back doors to look inside.

Congress is looking into legislation that would create mandatory visual or audio cues to make you check the back seat for kids, pets or anything else that's important.

One great idea came from a ten year old kid.

According to the Huffington Post, Bishop Curry, 10 heard about a neighbor's six month old infant dying in an overheated car, so he is creating a device that would prevent incidents like that.

Curry's device, called the Oasis, would respond to rising temperatures by emitting cool air and would use an antenna to alert parents and/or the authorities.

Curry only has a 3-D model of the Oasis now, but he and his parents are seeking investors to produce the actual device. Good idea!

Of course, studies, useful inventions, regulations and preparedness won't help in those cases where people are just evil or stupid. Or both.

Here's one awful example. The Weather Channel reported on a Florida woman who intentionally left her five year old son in a hot car while she went shopping.

Temperatures in the car reached 110 degrees, but fortunately a passerby noticed the kid and got the police involved in time.

The woman was arrested and as she was being transported in a police cruiser, she complained that it was too hot inside the squad car and demanded police turn up the air conditioning.

Police were not amused. The mom is charged with child neglect and the boy, now recovered, has been placed in the custody of his father.

Dumb Idea Chronicles: The Great Anti-Tornado Wall Of America

Tornado season is fast approaching in the United States, that potentially deadly time of year in the spring and early summer when large twisters level towns and cause general chaos across sections of the Great Plains, Midwest and South.

A tornado that was at an elevation of 11,900 feet
on Mt. Evans in Colorado in 2012. Mountains don't
necessarily stop tornadoes.  

It would be nice if we could prevent these destructive monsters, but we can't.

A guy named Rongjia Tao of Temple Univesity wants to try, though.

His thought: Erect three huge east to west walls across the central United States, one around North Dakota, the other near the Kansas-Oklahoma State line, and one around Texas and Louisiana.

He's going to present this idea to the American Physical Society in Denver this week, but pretty much everybody agrees this idea won't fly.

Tao's idea is that cold winds blast down from the north, and humid, warm winds come up from the south. The air masses collide, and that helps set off tornadoes.  He says his walls would block the winds, and thereby prevent the tornadoes from forming.

That's a oversimplication on my part, but Tao's got the basic idea about the winds right. But his proposed walls, each 1,000 feet all and 150 feet wide stretching across the Plains, though huge, won't disrupt the tornadoes. They're not nearly big enough. And even really HUGE walls might not make a difference.

Maybe these walls would briefly screw up a very weak tornado, maybe. But not a big one. And face it, who cares if a lame tornado rips one branch off a tree in the middle of nowhere?  But we do care very much when a powerful tornado levels a town and kills people. Tao's walls won't prevent that kind of tragedy.

Mountain range often don't stop or disrupt tornadoes, and mountain ranges are bigger than even Tao's proposal.

From USA Today:

"'It wouldn't work' tornado researcher Harold Brooks of the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, OK said in an email

Brooks said that China has deadly tornadoes despite the east-west mountain ranges there. In additon, he said, tornadoes still occur in parts of Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri despite the presense there of smaller east-west mountain ranges similar in size to Tao's proposed walls."

Brooks added: "This is essentially a case of a physicist, who may be very good in hsi sub discipine, talking about a subject about which he is abysmally ignorant."

Tornadoes often form more because of changes in temperature and wind direction as you go up vertically, rather than changes in temperature as you move from south to north.

Worse, some east-west mountain ranges could actually enhance the formation of tornadoes.

According to Wunderground:

"There are some east-west ridges in eastern Colorado, one is the Palmer Divide," (The Weather Channel's severe storm expert Dr. Greg) Forbes said. "Eddies to the north of the Palmer Divide when winds are from the southeast are a good breeding ground for tornadoes."

Here's a video (below) demonstrating how a hill can't really stop a tornado.  A strong tornado had just left Springfield, Mass in June, 2011. It scales a hill, and you can see it's not weakening. The person who shot the video ducked for cover once the tornado crested the hill and cut off the video.

Good thing: The tornado came down the hill at full strength and caused major damage to houses and other buildings in Monson, Mass. Watch, (but turn down the volume because the videographer added annoying music and sounds to the video):




Moreover, the cost of Tao's walls might far exceed the cost of the tornados the United States gets every year. It would cost maybe $60 billion for every 100 miles of wall built. And good luck getting the environmental and other permits, and obtaining the land to do this from the thousands of property owners that would be affected.

So for now, we're going to live with our current methods of dealing with tornadoes. That is, have the National Weather Service and other meteorologists issue warnings that a tornado is forming, and hope people get out of the way and into their basements and don't get killed.

For good measure, here's an even more dramatic tornado video than the one above. This one is a powerful twister having no trouble tearing up houses on a steep hill near West Liberty, Kentucky in March, 2012: