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Tuesday 11 September 2012

Cheetah's speed secrets are revealed




A sprinting cheetah is like "a rear-wheel-drive car," say scientists.
Japanese researchers mapped the muscle fibres of the big cat known to accelerate to record-breaking speeds.
By comparing the cheetah's muscles with those of a domestic cat and dog, the team identified the special propulsion power of its hindlimb muscles.
The study is the first to investigate muscle fibre distribution across the whole of the cheetah's body,
The findings are published in the journal Mammalian Biology and examine how the muscle fibres of domestic cats and dogs compare with those of the world's fastest land mammal.
Watch the video, it's really amazing!

"The study of muscles is indispensable to understand the cheetah's run," said Dr Naomi Wada, the study's co-author and Professor in System Physiology at Yamaguchi University in Japan.
Different types of muscle fibre are suited to different activities, explained Dr Wada.
By mapping the distribution of fibres across the muscles of a cheetah's body, scientists were able to gain insights into the animal's impressive sprint technique.
"The functional difference between forelimb and hindlimb is the most remarkable in the cheetah," said Dr Wada.
"The forelimb muscles in the cheetah included [the] most Type I muscle fibres of all three animals... while the muscle of hind limb muscles have many Type IIx fibres."
The team's results suggested that the power comes from the cheetah's hind legs, in the same way as a rear wheel-drive car, according to Dr Wada.
Further automative parallels could be drawn to describe how the cheetah handles at high speed.
The digits of the cheetah's hindlimbs contained no fast fibres, but the digits on the front legs contained many of them.
adapted from BBC News Science-Environment

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