Thursday, January 24, 2008

Born to Run

A great article in Discover magazine that essentially explains that humans are actually more efficient runners than horses, or gazelles, or even cheetahs. While all of these animals are faster than we are, humans have evolved to be able to run for longer periods of time at slower speeds. We can run for days apparently. This made us good at running our food down even though it might have been faster than we were. Quite a bit of scientific evidence goes into this but even things like our spines come into play allowing our heads to counter balance the movement of our arms. And our skin is one huge cooling system supplementing our cardiovascular systems ability to shunt heat from our core to our skin via the blood while our sweat and air flow carries the heat away from our bodies. It is a really good article.

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