A unique 2009 research project quantified (for the first time) the changes in elevation angles of ballet dancers’ legs between 1946 and 2004. Now a new study has examined (again for the first time) leg-length in relation to selected ballet performance indicators. “The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationships between leg […]
Tag: legs
Towards a robotic jumping flea (new study)
A South Korean research team, Gwang-Pil Jung and Kyu-Jin Cho, (School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering/Institute of Advanced Machines and Design, Seoul National University) and Hong-Cheol Choi (Department of Physics and Chemistry, Korea Military Academy, Seoul) have made progress towards the development of jumping flea robot. “Inspired by the relationship between leg compliance and jumping […]
Malaria Mosquitoes Can Get the Job Done When Missing Five Legs
If you are a malaria mosquito, and worry about insecticides that might cause you to lose one, two, three, four, or five of your six legs would also cause you to miss a meal of human blood… well, maybe you can ease up, a bit, on that particular worry. That’s what this new study suggests, […]
Shadows Cast by Spider Legs, Used in Physics Calculations
Anticipating Halloween, the American Chemical Society has published a study about using the shadows cast by (kinda sorta) spider legs, for scientific purposes. The paper is: “Elegant Shadow Making Tiny Force Visible for Water-Walking Arthropods and Updated Archimedes’ Principle,” Yelong Zheng, Hongyu Lu, Wei Yin, Dashuai Tao, Lichun Shi, and Yu Tian, Langmuir, 2016, 32 (41), pp. […]
Future Sock
“Why do people need to keep on buying so many socks? Given the technological capabilities available, the creation of socks that do not wear out would not seem to be beyond our collective productive capacities. Indeed, […] they already exist, but the space to make this choice has not been opened up. They are not […]
Conceivabilism, inconceivabilism and someone with 200 arms and legs
Sometimes, philosophers like to construct highly exaggerated imaginary scenarios in order to test the validity of theories – conjuring up, for example, human bodies with a pair of spare eyes in their shoulders. Since there’s no very little limit on how exaggerated such propositions might be, some take on outlandish proportions. Such ideas can push […]
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 […]
Ballet Dancers doing splits in an MRI scanner [hip study]
Quite a number of professional ballet dancers suffer from medical conditions brought about by their requirement to perform very extreme leg movements. To accurately evaluate such problems physicians would, ideally, like to be able to carry out MRI scans of ballet dancers whilst performing the splits. [that’s the dancers, not the physicians] And, impractical as […]
Quantifying ballet dancers’ leg-lift angles
Very few scientific studies have formally investigated the angles to which ballet dancers lift their legs. But in 2009, a team from : the Dipartimento di Neuroscienze and Centro di Biomedicina Spaziale, Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata, Roma, Italy, the Dipartimento di Fisiologia Neuromotoria, IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, Roma, Italy, the Dipartimento di […]
Ants with stilts: An experiment
Alex Bellos writes: In the first chapter of my book I mention experiments at the University of Ulm that discovered that Saharan desert ants have a sense of number. Researchers first sent ants down a tunnel for food. Once the ants reached the food some of the ants had pig bristles attached to their legs, […]