This newscast is updated weekdays at 6am, 9am, noon, 3pm, and 6pm. I'm joined by the show's two hosts, Regina Barber and Emily Kwong. Hey to both of you. Tell us what they are. All right. Gina, I want to start with how crowds of people can act like fluids. And this is a gathering the day before the running of the bulls. OK, do you want to see? Like red water. They're, like, all dressed in red, or they're waving red things. I can't see from this far. And this is a video from a rooftop, and you can, like, really see that dense crowd.
And they are - they're, like, kind of moving like water. Well, I mean, what's interesting about this gathering in Spain is that it's actually known to be very safe, even though there are so many people. But you may remember the Astroworld Festival in Houston in - there, 10 fans died in a crowd crush.
So scientists want to understand what went wrong and how can we keep people safe in crowds? So what's very dangerous when you're in a dense crowd is to be close to rigid walls. You want to be in the bulk. Do not go to the boundaries. Stay away from the walls. And he and his colleagues wanted to learn more about the factors that can turn crowds dangerous - specifically, those spontaneous movements of, like, dense crowds.
So his team studied this Spanish festival crowd during four separate years. So in the past, they thought that crowd movements were random or chaotic, but Denis and his team broke down the physics of the fluctuations and modeled the crowd.
And for the first time, they found that dense crowds followed recurring, predictable patterns, like clumping together and swaying, and And they are very easy to detect very early on, before they become dangerous. So the hope is that being able to monitor how a dense crowd moves brings us one step closer to figuring out what to do when it gets dangerous.
