Word: climb
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Husky and hairy, with the flaming orange coloring of a bad dye job, the orangutan doesn't look like the most agile of primates. But in fact these great apes, native to the jungles of Malaysia and Indonesia, climb and swing nimbly through the canopy more than 100 feet in the air, their fleet-footed acrobatics allowing them to make their home in the treetops and access remote food sources, like the fruit at the very ends of branches. (Read "Kalimantan's Camp Orangutan...
...recently, however, scientists did not understand exactly how such a large primate - weighing up to 180 lb., orangutans are the largest living arboreal animal - can navigate the delicate branches at the top of the tallest trees. At that height, tree branches are thin and begin to wobble as animals climb on them, much as a suspension footbridge vibrates as people walk over it. Too much vibration and an orangutan can be thrown off altogether. From high in the trees, such a fall would be deadly. (See pictures of a bonobo Eden...
Instead, Thorpe and her colleagues found that orangutans move irregularly, shifting from side to side, moving backward and forward, using all four limbs at once, even walking upright on branches - all to keep disturbance to a minimum. In a way, they climb like humans might, if we were transplanted to the Sumatran jungle. "They move a bit like Tarzan in the old movies, swinging from branch to branch - only, orangutans do it like they do everything else, much more slowly," says Thorpe, whose team obtained nearly 3,000 visual observations of orangutans in motion during a yearlong study...
...orangutans' unique locomotion also helps them reduce the time and energy needed to climb. The more flexible a tree branch is, the more it will bend under an animal's weight. "That means they can lose height, and gaining height again is costly because you have to oppose gravity," points out Thorpe. When an orangutan leaps from a flexible branch it also loses motion energy - think of jumping off a pile of sand versus one of asphalt - and when they land on a flexible branch, they have to wait for the vibrations to stop before they can jump again, which...
More than 80,000 people are currently awaiting a kidney transplant in the U.S. The climb to the top of the waiting list takes anywhere from one to six years, and the delay is both agonizing and potentially deadly - each year, some 6% of patients die while waiting to be matched with a donor. Given those grim statistics, some argue kidney sales should be legalized. Paying in the ballpark of $100,000, Matas argues, is a better economic bet than our current system, in which Medicare pays for indefinite dialysis treatment - which is both costly and debilitating - for nearly...