Word: motion
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...cover was conceived and framed by Washington bureau chief Michael Duffy, who set it in motion months ago. The story was written by Washington correspondent Massimo Calabresi and senior correspondent Michael Weisskopf. Calabresi covered the last two years of the Bush White House for TIME and spoke to many of Bush's former political advisers for this story. Weisskopf, a tenacious journalist who lost his right hand while reporting for TIME in Iraq, spent two months interviewing legal sources on all sides of the story, going back to them again and again to clarify the issues...
...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...
...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 costs more time...
...back oscillates up and down about 6 in. (150 mm) throughout its stride, and fore and aft about 4 in. (100 mm). The jockey moves too - up and down through a cycle of 2.3 in. (60 mm), and fore and aft just 0.8 in. (20 mm). That small motion makes a very big difference...
This minimize-the-load strategy operates in other places beyond the racetrack. We adopt it intuitively when we're carrying a heavy load and find ourselves maintaining an even, almost level gait, thus reducing the up and down motion that makes a bundle seem to weigh more on every downward bounce. Spence suggests that the same concept could be applied to improve the performance of artificial legs. "It's not crazy to say you'd be able to use this to build better prosthetic limbs for people. If you're trying to build a prosthetic limb to handle a bumpy...