With Virtopsy defining a comprehensive (not exclusively radiological) approach to tissue examination [1] but also material testing, we tested a bicycle helmet (Model “Sweep”, Bell Helmets, Bell Sports, BRG Sports, Scott Valley, CA, USA) whose user (40 year old woman, riding a race bike on Swiss winter roads partly covered with snow, ice and sleet) had sustained a fall when slipping in a curve. The fall mainly resulted in soft tissue contusions over the left hip and thigh. No bicycle damage, apparent helmet impact, head injury, headache, neck or face injury, loss of consciousness, nausea or dizziness were reported. The helmet was subjected to CT-scanning (Fig. 1A–R; Fig. 2V, W, and Y) as well as visual inspection both in self-contained (Fig. 2S and T) and strain loaded (Fig. 2U) state. The helmet exhibited a plastic net (E–H; cross sections of the plastic net shown in I, and in part in K–P, V, W and Y) that appeared to be fully embedded in the styrofoam shape (Fig. 1A–E). The combination of both is crucial to understand the problem: with the plastic net constraining the styrofoam parts, the