Latest Locomotion Stories

As a growing number of drivers turn to biking and walking amid higher gas prices, Internet mapping firms and local organizations are being pushed to provide maps of the quickest, safest biking and walking routes.Many pedestrians are hoping to simply turn to the Internet for optimum routes, much the same way drivers have found online directions for years.  Leading map service firms are already responding to the new demand.  Google Inc. recently launched its walking-directions service,...

Somewhere in the murky past, between four and seven million years ago, a hungry common ancestor of today's primates, including humans, did something novel. While temporarily standing on its rear feet to reach a piece of fruit, this protohominid spotted another juicy morsel in a nearby shrub and began shuffling toward it instead of dropping on all fours, crawling to the shrub and standing again. A number of reasons have been proposed for the development of bipedal behavior, or walking on two...

Infant carrying ruled out as reason why humans walk uprightScientists investigating the reasons why early humans "“ the so-called hominins "“ began walking upright say it's unlikely that the need to carry children was a factor, as has previously been suggested.Carrying babies that could no longer use their feet to cling to their parents in the way that young apes can has long been thought to be at least one explanation as to why humans became bipedal.But University of Manchester...

By Fulk, George D Echternach, John L Background and Purpose: Gait speed is commonly used to assess walking ability in persons with stroke. Previous research related to the psychometric properties of gait speed has been conducted primarily with individuals who were able to walk independently and/ or were in the later stages of recovery after stroke. The purpose of this research was to examine the test-retest reliability and minimal detectable change (MDC^sub 90^) of gait speed in individuals...

Southeast Asian colugo could help researchers understand evolution of gliding and flightBerkeley -- The "flying" lemur of Malaysia is the champion of all gliding mammals, able to drop from the forest canopy, glide more than the length of two football fields, execute 90-degree turns and then alight gently on a tree trunk.Researchers in Singapore, the United Kingdom and at the University of California, Berkeley, are discovering how these animals move with the help of a miniature...

A letter published in the advanced online publication Nature has revealed new insight into the evolution of flight in birds.    The issue has remained controversial among scientists, and previous theories have usually been based on interpretations of various fossil forms.   However, this new report is based on experimental observations of young birds, and suggests wing-stroke dynamics are the key to understanding the evolution of avian flight.The research was led by Ken Dial,...

A new study provides support for the hypothesis that walking on two legs, or bipedalism, evolved because it used less energy than quadrupedal knucklewalking. David Raichlen, an assistant professor of anthropology at The University of Arizona, conducted the study with Michael Sockol from the University of California, Davis, who was the lead author of the paper, and Herman Pontzer from Washington University in St. Louis. Raichlen and his colleagues will publish the article, "Chimpanzee...

By Charnicia E. Huggins NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Theirs may not be a contact sport, but high school cross-country runners are not exempt from injury. In fact, injuries are quite common among these athletes, new study findings show. "The results from our study suggest that the injury rates of high school cross country runners continue to be consistently high, per athletic exposure (i.e., actual runner participation in a practice or meet), especially for girls, and that the causes of...

NASA -- A single unifying physics theory can essentially describe how animals of every ilk, from flying insects to fish, get around, researchers at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering and Pennsylvania State University have found. The team reports that all animals bear the same stamp of physics in their design. The researchers show that so-called "constructal theory" can explain basic characteristics of locomotion for every creature -- how fast they get from one place to...

Biologists examining evidence for the claim that birds evolved from dinosaurs have reached some surprising new conclusions. However, they caution that "the problem of avian origins is far from being resolved." Their analysis is published online October 10, 2005 in the Journal of Morphology, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and available via Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com/journal/morphology). Dinosaurs have long captured the imagination while their...