VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, [4] ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 10:53:19 03/13/02 Wed
Author: Buffy's vampire
Subject: Do people sweat or do they perspire?

As dawn breaks, Linnette Otieno leaves her small house on Nairobi's outskirts and walks eight kilometres to market. On her head is a load of firewood she plans to sell, weighing about 30 kilograms. She hardly sweats.

"I've been doing this since I was six," she says as she hoists the wood onto her head. When she was growing up a village in western Kenya, she had to walk even further to gather firewood - up to eight hours a day. By now, aged 35, she says long journeys with heavy loads are second nature.

Scientists have long wondered how women like Ms Otieno are able to carry so much so easily. In a study to be published shortly, two researchers from Europe describe the trick in detail: women from certain African tribes unconsciously modify their gait to walk using less energy. The energy they save is applied to carrying the weight.

The study, which follows two previous articles in the journal Nature, is the first documentation of humans improving the economy of walking.

"Every person and every animal that we have yet tested has roughly the same walking economy, except for these African women," said an author of the study, Norman Heglund, a physiologist at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium.


R.McNeill Alexander, an expert on biomechanics, said the study could be an important step to understanding how to improve the human walk. Using the results, "we might be able to teach hikers with rucksacks and soldiers with heavy packs to save similar amounts of energy".

The research began when Dr Heglund was working in Kenya in 1977.


It later showed African women have a secret weapon: as they transfer their weight, they transfer at least 80 per cent of their forward energy to the next step.

Only 20 per cent must be replaced by the muscles, leaving plenty of energy in reserve to carry the weight on their heads.


The New York Times

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

[ Contact Forum Admin ]

Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.