Five elite gymnasts performed giant circles on the high bar under different conditions of loading (without and with 6-kg loads attached to the shoulders, waist or ankles). Comparing the gymnasts' kinematic pattern of movement with that of a triple-pendulum moving under the sole influence of nonmuscular forces revealed qualitative similarities, including the adoption of an arched position during...

Activities with high spinal loads should be avoided by patients with back problems. Awareness about these activities and knowledge of the associated loads are important for the proper design and pre-clinical testing of spinal implants. The loads on an instrumented vertebral body replacement have been telemetrically measured for approximately 1000 combinations of activities and parameters in 5 p...

Reducing the data cache stalls is getting more important as the gap between the CPU speed and the memory speed continues to grow. Many compiler-based techniques including prefetches have been proposed to mitigate the problem for numerical loops, but they are not very applicable to nonnumerical integer loops. One simple idea applicable even to those loops is separating cache-missing loads and th...

Stride length, stride frequency and power output are all factors influencing locomotor performance. Here, we first test whether mass-specific power output limits climbing performance in two species of geckos (Hemidactylus garnoti and Gekko gecko) by adding external loads to their bodies. We then test whether body size has a negative effect on mass-specific power output. Finally, we test whether...

The purpose of this study was to examine how wave-induced platform motion effects postural stability when handling loads. Twelve participants (9 male, 3 female) performed a sagittal lifting/lowering task with a 10 kg load in different sea conditions off the coast of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Trunk kinematics and foot center of force were measured using the Lumbar Motion Monitor and F-Scan f...

The dynamic response analysis of structures subjected to a stochastic wind field is carried out in the time domain by a step-by-step integration approach. The loading is represented by simulated time histories of the aerodynamic force. The auto-regressive and moving average (ARMA) recursive models are utilized to simulate time series of wind loads. Depending on the system dynamic characteristic...

Inhomogeneous materials, variable foundations, non-uniform cross-sections, and non-uniformly distributed loads are common in engineering structures typically complicate their mechanical analysis considerably. This paper presents an accurate efficient numerical method for the dynamic of functionally graded beams resting on inhomogeneous viscoelastic foundations subjected to moving load investiga...