IT MAY be ungainly, but a penguin’s waddling gait is actually quite
efficient. Researchers had thought that waddling from side to side wasted
energy—when walking, penguins use twice as much energy as other animals of
a similar weight. So Timothy Griffin of the University of California at Berkeley
and Rodger Kram of the University of Colorado at Boulder measured the forces
exerted by five emperor penguins as they walked across a platform.
This showed that the penguins don’t waste the “sideways energy”, but instead
store it up as potential energy, just like a pendulum swinging (Nature,
vol 408, p…
