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The story
At Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement park in California, two female riders suffered severe brain injuries in separate incidents just six days apart after riding the thrill coaster “X2,” undergoing emergency brain surgery, according to reports from JoongAng Ilbo-affiliated media. X2 is known for its unique design featuring seats that rotate independently. On 5ch’s Science News+ thread, opinions were divided over whether the cause lay in the G-forces involved or in inadequate safety management, and debate also broke out over whether even a small number of cases should be treated as a serious problem.
© JoongAng Ilbo / JoongAng Ilbo Japanese Edition
2026.08.28 10:50
At Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement park in California, two female riders suffered severe brain injuries while riding the roller coaster “X2” within a six-day span and underwent emergency brain surgery.
Source: s.japanese.joins.com / Original article here
What people said
A concussion happens when the brain shakes violently and the blood vessels connecting it to the skull tear.
If centrifugal force slams it to one side, the vessels on the other side just snap.
If you're going to ride, get an MRI first to make sure it's safe.
Sounds like riding could actually cause a vessel to rupture, so better to just skip it.
You should have to wear a helmet to ride a roller coaster.
You just can't spin an untrained person around like that lol
>Its defining feature is that the seats rotate 360 degrees while in motion.
That's just a high-performance pudding mixer.
The seats rotate vertically, independent of the track.
Didn't seem that intense to me, honestly.
Can it really send you upward head-first like that?
Wasn't negative vertical G capped at around -1G even for fighter pilots?
They're undergoing ultra-high-speed vibration, and that's exactly what causes concussions and brain damage!
And it's now confirmed that if fighter jets did the same thing as Re: #1, the pilots would suffer brain damage too.
Flying saucers use inertial control technology, so they're fine.
Can you even build an anti-gravity device in the first place?
0 to 500 km/h in 3 seconds.
Pulls 8G max while cornering.
If they'd at least given the peak G-force, or how many Gs for how many seconds, fine, but…
All they give is top speed — how am I supposed to make any scientific judgment from that?
Did you even read the article!?
That's beside the point — the issue is that it happened to more than one person.
According to Heinrich's Law, if a major incident occurs, there are quite a few moderate incidents behind it, and a huge number of minor ones.
It's just a matter of whether it makes the news or not.
If anything, they're the ones who caused trouble for the park — they should be paying damages.
The ones causing trouble are the operators who can't design this thing safely.
If they don't want to get sued, they should have riders sign a waiver.
Maybe have riders wear an HMD and show them footage shot by a drone instead?
Background and Key Points of Debate
X2 is a “4th Dimension” style coaster whose seats rotate independently along the vertical axis as it races along the track, giving it a more complex, multidirectional G-force profile than a standard coaster. On the thread, some pointed to a plausible mechanism: rapid rotation shakes the brain inside the skull, damaging the blood vessels connecting brain and skull and causing bleeding — a pattern that lines up with the typical medical mechanism behind brain hemorrhage. On the other hand, since the vast majority of riders on the same coaster showed no ill effects, opinion split between those who saw it as “just a rare coincidence of two isolated accidents” and those who argued that two incidents in such a short span warrants scrutiny of the park’s safety management. That said, the report doesn’t include technical details like peak G-force figures, so whether the cause truly lies in the ride’s design can’t be determined from the information in this article alone.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Science News+) thread “America’s ‘Death Coaster’… Two Women Undergo Brain Surgery in 6 Days.”
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