• 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: gait
Is This True? “The Liar’s Walk—Detecting Deception with Gait and Gesture”
A new study about walking and liars and computers is bountiful for teachers who want their students to decide whether to believe bold claims. See if you can count the bold claims made in the study. “The Liar’s Walk—Detecting Deception with Gait and Gesture,” Tanmay Randhavane, Uttaran Bhattacharya, Kyra Kapsaskis, Kurt Gray, Aniket Bera, Dinesh […]
Skipping on the Moon – fun maybe, but is it efficient?
History has shown* that astronauts, or more accurately lunarnauts, often like to skip about when they’re on the Moon. But, fun though it might seem, is skipping (in reduced gravity situations) an efficient way to get around? Research teams from the Laboratory of Physiomechanics of Locomotion, Department of Pathophysiology and Transplantation, University of Milan, Italy, […]
Robot-Trained Water Gait
Robotics are having an effect on water gait, as described in this study: “Robotic gait trainer in water: Development of an underwater gait-training orthosis,” Tasuku Miyoshi, Kazuaki Hiramatsu, Shin-Ichiro Yamamoto, Kimitaka Nakazawa, and Masami Akai, Disability and Rehabilitation, vol. 30, no. 2, 2008, pp. 81-87. The authors are at the Shibaura Institute of Technology, the […]
Artists and their difficulties with gaits
Even the most accomplished artists sometimes have difficulty in accurately portraying human anatomy. Paul Cezzane, for instance, had trouble with hands (examples [1] [2] [3] ). Another persistently tricky area is highlighted (or, if you prefer, highlit) by Professor Julian Meltzoff of La Jolla, California,in a recent article for Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the […]
The effect of potholes in the path of helmeted guinea fowl
What happens when Helmeted Guinea Fowl, out walking, encounter an unexpected pothole? Do they fall over? That depends, in quite an improbable way, on whether they see it coming or not … In 2005, a research team at Concord Field Station, the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, US, endeavoured to clarify things by encouraging […]
‘Silly Walk’ studies (#2)
The Movement Lab at Ohio State University, US, is not the only academic institution to have experimentally evaluated ‘Silly Walks’ (see Part 1 of this series). On the other side of the Atlantic at the Department of Motion Science, University of Muenster, Germany, researchers Sook-Yee Chong, Heiko Wagner and Arne Wul have also performed a study. […]
The gait of the shoeless
This study looks at the gait of the shoeless: “To what extent does not wearing shoes affect the local dynamic stability of the gait? Effect size and intra-session repeatability,” Philippe Terrier, Fabienne Reynard, http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.5510, March 5, 2013. (Thanks to investigator Francis Villatoro for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at Institute for Research in […]
Groucho Running (Locomotion, part 1)
Please observe the unusual locomotive behaviour which begins at around 55 seconds into this video – when Groucho Marx starts to run. Groucho is displaying a behaviour which scientists now call ‘Groucho Running’ *see note. But Groucho was by no means the first to develop this unusual gait. Take, for example the Tinamou. It also […]