Word: branches
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...understand how orangutans swing, it helps to compare them to their primate cousins, the chimpanzees. Chimpanzees pull their bodies close to the tree branch as they move, but being relatively small, they can do that without worrying about the vibrations caused by their own body weight. If orangutans behaved that way, the vibrations would build dangerously, as they do on a suspension bridge...
Instead, Thorpe and her colleagues found that orangutans move irregularly, shifting from side to side, moving backward and forward, using all four limbs at once, even walking upright on branches - all to keep disturbance to a minimum. In a way, they climb like humans might, if we were transplanted to the Sumatran jungle. "They move a bit like Tarzan in the old movies, swinging from branch to branch - only, orangutans do it like they do everything else, much more slowly," says Thorpe, whose team obtained nearly 3,000 visual observations of orangutans in motion during a yearlong study...
...orangutans' unique locomotion also helps them reduce the time and energy needed to climb. The more flexible a tree branch is, the more it will bend under an animal's weight. "That means they can lose height, and gaining height again is costly because you have to oppose gravity," points out Thorpe. When an orangutan leaps from a flexible branch it also loses motion energy - think of jumping off a pile of sand versus one of asphalt - and when they land on a flexible branch, they have to wait for the vibrations to stop before they can jump again, which...
...PNAS study found that by swaying from one flexible tree branch to the next, orangutans actually use less energy than they would if they leaped from branch to branch, or if they climbed down trees, moved on the ground and climbed back up again. (The fact that the Sumatran tiger - before it became critically endangered - was a serious threat to the orangutan probably helped encourage tree travel.) Climbing helps the orangutan adapt neatly to its arboreal environment...
...Personal Touch From the beginning, President Obama has taken almost the exact opposite route than that taken by President Bill Clinton in 1993. The Clinton health-care plan was written in secret, without input from Congress, before the Administration tried to ram it down the throat of the legislative branch. The catastrophic failure of that strategy is still burned into the minds of many former Clinton staffers, including Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel...