A Swinging Arm Galvanometer

Dynamic arm swinging in human walking.

Humans tend to swing their arms when they walk, a curious behaviour since the arms play no obvious role in bipedal gait. It might be costly to use muscles to swing the arms, and it is unclear whether potential benefits elsewhere in the body would justify such costs. To examine these costs and benefits, we developed a passive dynamic walking model with free-swinging arms. Even with no torques dr...

The swinging lever-arm hypothesis of muscle contraction

The molecular mechanism of muscle contraction is a problem that has exercised biophysicists and biochemists for many years. The common view of the mechanism is embodied in the 'cross-bridge hypothesis', in which the relative sliding of thick (myosin) and thin (actin) filaments in cross-striated muscle is brought about by the 'cross-bridges', parts of the myosin molecules which protrude from the...

The Sound of One Arm Swinging: a Model for Multidimensional Auditory Display of Physical Motion

We present a novel approach to the sonification of complex human movement. As a specific model we examine the golf swing, of which two components, the velocity of the club head and the relative rotation of shoulders with respect to the hips (the X-factor [1]) are considered as two critical factors [2]. We map these dimensions to independent resonant filters to simulate vowel like formants. We c...

The Swinging Spring : A Simple

Multi-enzyme complexes on DNA scaffolds capable of substrate channeling with an artificial swinging arm