Man vs Orang in swinging science
How do orangutans swing through the trees? Carefully.
That awful joke takes us smoothly into the first of two studies today on the science of swinging.
First up: in a paper published in PNAS three researchers describe their work on how Sumatran orangutans move on spindly branches that appear incapable of holding their hefty weight. It seems that the animals carefully avoid setting up resonance effects of the kind that causes bridges to wobble when people march in step across them.
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