stampede

Scientists want to study stampedes at places like sports arenas and music concerts, so they can figure out how to prevent them. They can’t study actual human stampedes, so what can they do??They stampede mice instead. They’ve discovered that fewer, smaller exits actually enable more mice (and people) to escape.

Gaia Vince writes in New Scientist that experiments on how panicked mice escape from enclosed areas show that they behave in the same way computer models predict humans do. Disasters such as the May 2001 stampede at a football stadium in Ghana that killed more than 120 people, and the February 2003 Chicago nightclub stampede that killed 21 people, have made scientists try to develop models to predict how people will behave when trying to flee.
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