• Most people tend to walk with their elbows slightly bent. • Most people tend to run with their elbows acutely bent. • No-one knows why. There is however, a(n) hypothesis. It’s the ‘Mechanical Tradeoff Hypothesis.’ which was descibed by Andrew K. Yegian, Yanish Tucker, Stephen Gillinov and Daniel E. Lieberman in their 2019 paper […]
Tag: energy
Optimising one’s arm-swing whilst walking – a cost/benefit analysis [new study]
“Humans tend to swing their arms when they walk, a curious behaviour since the arms play no obvious role in bipedal gait. It might be costly to use muscles to swing the arms, and it is unclear whether potential benefits elsewhere in the body would justify such costs.” If you’re a living thing, energy is […]
The Choo Lab’s Humming Generator
Many research groups across the world are in the process of developing so-called ‘Energy Harvesting’ (EH) techniques to extract electrical energy from human actions. (see for example, Implementing a knee-energy harvester). The Choo Lab at Caltech specializes in such things, and researchers there have recently developed a system which is designed to power portable electronic […]
How much energy is there in all the excess human fat in the USA?
This paper, about the amount of energy contained in fat people in the USA, can fuel a new level of contentiousness in the nation’s ongoing, highly opinionated debates about energy policy, and perhaps about other things: “How much energy is locked in the USA? Alternative metrics for characterising the magnitude of overweight and obesity derived […]