This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them: Down, with texting — Want to guess what might happen if someone walks while texting? If you prefer a formally educated guess to an autodidactic supposition, Paulo Pelicioni and his colleagues at the University of New […]
Walking, a lottery, failure, frenzy, the number 97… this study has all of those, and perhaps other things as well: “Failure is Also an Option,” Antoine Amarilli, Marc Beunardeau, and Rémi Géraud, and David Naccache, in The New Codebreakers, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2016, pp. 161-165. The authors report: “The Nijmeegse Vierdaagse is the world’s most […]
Claudio Feliciani, co-winner of the 2021 Ig Nobel Prize for kinetics, is the subject of an NHK-World TV special, which you can watch online. NHK explains: Claudio Feliciani is a Swiss-Italian scientist whose main interest is the movement of crowds. He worked alongside 3 Japanese scientists on a study that examined why people bump into […]
“Children and Walking and Toes” is a featured revue article in the special Children issue (volume 27, number 5) of the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Read this article, free, on the web. Then, if research about kids inspires you, subscribe to the magazine, or buy individual back issues.
• 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 […]
A new review study creeps and leaps upon a physiological resemblance of cats and humans. The study is: “We Are Upright-Walking Cats: Human Limbs as Sensory Antennae During Locomotion,” Gregory E.P. Pearcey and E. Paul Zehr, Physiology, epub 2019. The authors, at the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria, explain in un-catlike […]
“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 […]
It’s a staple gag for any slapstick movie. Trying for a wider shot, a photographer walks backwards (without looking) and trips over something. Amusing perhaps, but on occasions dangerous too. Odd then, that in the academic literature on safety and ergonomics, there a very few scholarly studies of this ubiquitous syndrome. In fact, there may […]
“An inebriated person in Nice (see Figure 1) takes a walk, each step in one of the four cardinal directions, north (N), south (S), east (E), and west (W). We are interested in those walks beginning at the center of the Promenade des Anglais (at the southern end of town) and ending anywhere on the […]
“There is no known mechanical apparatus enabling a human being to walk in a prone position, like a lizard, like a spider, close to the ground, using arms and legs as will be made possible with the Quadra Walker (QW) disclosed herein.” Its inventor, Herbert Russell Burnham of Chula Vista, California, explains in a newly […]