The Science Pawdcast

Episode 8 Season 7: The Perfect 13-Degree Angle, One Foot Jumps, and Pet Power

• Jason and Kris Zackowski • Season 7 • Episode 8

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This week on The Science Pawdcast:

• MIT researchers identified a 13-degree threshold in pedestrian movement patterns, below which people naturally form orderly lanes
• Angular spread exceeding 13 degrees creates chaotic, inefficient pedestrian flow in public spaces


• UC Berkeley engineers developed SALTO, a one-legged jumping robot inspired by squirrel biomechanics
• SALTO can land on narrow perches by mimicking how squirrels absorb 86% of landing energy with their front legs
• NASA is developing similar technology for exploring Saturn's moon with football-field length hops


• Study of 685 families found pets provided significant emotional comfort to children during COVID-19 isolation
• Children with rabbits, guinea pigs and birds showed higher attachment and comfort than those with cats or dogs
• Girls demonstrated higher pet attachment and more positive treatment of animals than boys

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Speaker 1:

Hello science enthusiasts. I'm Jason Zukoski. And I'm Chris Zukoski, we're the pet parents of Bunsen, beaker, bernoulli and Ginger.

Speaker 2:

The science animals on social media.

Speaker 1:

If you love science.

Speaker 2:

And you love pets.

Speaker 1:

You've come to the right spot, so put on your safety glasses and hold on to your tail.

Speaker 1:

This is the science podcast. Hello everybody and welcome back to the science podcast. We hope you're happy and healthy out there. This is episode eight of season seven. I apologize for my voice. After this I woke up and I could barely talk and I had to teach all day and Chris and I could only record it one day, so you're going to have to deal with my sick sounding voice. I feel fine. That aside, it has snowed all week. So for the weather update, it's almost. March is almost over and we do get a ton of snow in March, but it snowed all day and there's copious amounts of snow and it's cold. The creek is freezing up again. The creek was running, but it's not froze up again and the weather and snow was so bad.

Speaker 1:

The photos out of our capital of Alberta, Edmonton. They had to close major roads because it was so bananas like buses sideways and these are like people who know how to drive in the winter with proper winter tires Just wild, Okay. Well, what's on the show this week? We have two science news items this week. The first one is about the perfect angle to keep people walking seamlessly, and the second is all about a one-legged jumping robot Pretty cute In Pet Science we look at a really wholesome study that checked out the mental health of kids during the pandemic and how pets may be helped. All right, let's get on with the show. There's no time like Science Time. This week in Science News, let's talk about walking in crowded locations. Chris, you and I are both teachers. After a school assembly, getting out of the assembly is like the most crowded I've ever been in my entire life.

Speaker 2:

That and walking in the hallways at lunchtime or during a transition from class to class and you're trying to get to the bathroom because, as a teacher, there's a finite amount of time that you have to go use the bathroom, so you're trying to get there quickly but it's like clogged arteries.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and especially if you're trying to move against the grain, like good luck after our after a pep rally at our school with a thousand kids or more and everybody's trying to get to class after the pep rally. If a kid like left their phone in the bleachers and they're trying to get back, I'm just feel so bad for them. I'm like that's not happening. That's like swimming upstream but the stream is moving like 20 times faster than you can move.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, exactly, cause everybody has one agenda and that's to get out of the gym. And here you are trying to get into the gym.

Speaker 1:

I've rarely been in places where it's been that busy in my life, and we've been to some pretty major cities like Los Angeles and New York, though when we were at Times Square that was pretty crazy busy that one night.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and then we also walked up and down the strip in Vegas. That wasn't too bad.

Speaker 1:

That wasn't too bad. There was a lot of people, but it wasn't too bad. Yeah, and I guess that's what this article is about. Mit instructor Carol Backick and his colleagues were looking to understand and predict the transition between two types of pedestrian flow, where you have one type of flow, which is like people walking very organized in lanes, and chaotic flow, where people are weaving unpredictably everywhere.

Speaker 2:

So through their research, they're hoping to help design safer, more efficient public spaces by providing the scientific basis for pedestrian traffic patterns.

Speaker 1:

And this was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. And here's the scenario Pedestrians are navigating a busy crosswalk and they're crossing at various angles and dodging one another to avoid collisions. All of the researchers use some pretty advanced thinking and techniques like mathematical modeling, fluid dynamics, computer simulations and even controlled physical experiments with people walking around in a gym.

Speaker 2:

What they were looking at is a concept called angular spread, and angular spread is defined as the range of directions that pedestrians take when they're crossing, and what they found is if there is a smaller angular spread is, if there is a smaller angular spread, so people moving in opposite directions, for example, directly across a sidewalk that encourages orderly, lane-like flow, whereas a larger angular spread, where people are walking in various directions.

Speaker 1:

So, for an example, an open concourse. That led to disordered and inefficient flow. Oh so, like you're funneled into one direction versus you're not given a direction, you can walk wherever you want.

Speaker 2:

And so when we were in New York, we definitely followed the flow of the traffic because we didn't know where we were going and everybody else really looked like they did and they were getting there in a hurry.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, the sidewalks were fast, but then when we got to Times Square it was a schmoz. So that's like the open concourse versus the smaller angular spread of lane-like flow on the sidewalks. And you're right, people were booking it in New York. Boy, they've got places to go.

Speaker 2:

I noticed everybody was wearing sneakers.

Speaker 1:

Which was so smart.

Speaker 2:

They were dressed up in their suits, but they had like running shoes on and I thought, wow, that is smart.

Speaker 1:

So you mentioned angular spread. And here's something interesting their critical finding in the study was a 13 degree threshold. That was the tipping point. If the average crossing angle exceeded 13 degrees, so you could cross more than 13 degrees away from somebody the pedestrian flow became disordered. But below this threshold, if you're funneled into a zone, spontaneous lane formation would occur without the need to paint the ground or have up cones or ropes or anything like that. It's just if the average crossing angle was less than 13 degrees, people just formed lanes and they went along their life in lanes. But if it was more than that, chaos.

Speaker 2:

So how did they find that?

Speaker 1:

So they looked at lane formation in previous studies.

Speaker 1:

There's like an imbalance in left versus right turning behavior.

Speaker 1:

That's an interesting thing as well, as when you are queuing up in a line, humans tend to queue to the left. So here's a pro tip if you're at like the movie theater and you only have a few times to get your treats and your snacks, if you go to the far right till chances are it'll have less people on it than the left, till we're just on average, drawn to the left, we are more likely to turn to the left, and then of course, that affects lane formation. One of their main conclusions comes from their experiment where they had people in a gym they're volunteers and they gave them hats with barcodes on them that you would at your UPC code, you'd scan at the supermarket, and they had barcodes on their hats so they could be tracked from overhead. And then they were just asked to walk from start to end across a crosswalk and of course each trial started and ended and created different flow patterns. And then they used those angles and they changed the angles people moved at to determine if orderly flow performed or not.

Speaker 2:

So their finding was the mathematical predictions matched their observed pedestrian behavior. So they were looking for that angular spread beyond 13 degrees which they found led to no lane formation and slower and less efficient movement. And so this demonstrated the robustness of lane formation theory in an actual, imperfect, real life condition formation theory in an actual, imperfect, real life condition.

Speaker 1:

And obviously, if you're a city planner and you're listening to this or you're reading that research and you want your pedestrians to move from point A to point B as quickly as possible, the rule of 13 is the golden standard. So I don't know how many city planners or city engineers are listening and I honestly don't know how you funnel people into a less than 13 degree angle, but that's how you get people to book it instead of wandering around staring up into the sky, like I was in New York City.

Speaker 2:

That's true. This made me think of disorder. When we're walking on a hiking trail with Beaker. She has a move. It's called the the I'm going to trip you so you fall on your face. Move. She reminds me of a chaotic pedestrian.

Speaker 1:

oh, where she like stops suddenly for no reason and then backs up, and then backs up between your legs and if you're not prepared for it, you just trip over her. Yeah, yeah, she does that lots. After about 20 minutes she's normal, but the first 20 minutes she's it's like having a pure chaos on a leash yeah, but we love her yeah so there you go.

Speaker 1:

Keep your, keep your angle under 13 degrees and you'll get places faster. That's our first science article for this week. Our second science news item is all about a squirrel inspired jumping robot. We have not had a lot of luck getting Norbert on the trail cam lately and we're getting worried, but that's. This is not about Norbert. The last thing on the trail cam for the last month has been a squirrel. For the last month has been a squirrel doing parkour on the snow, like jumping up and getting seeds from weeds or running down the tree and jumping everywhere. They're super cute and super agile.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And you know which one of our dogs hates squirrels the most?

Speaker 2:

Bunsen, but it's chipmunks. Oh, that's right.

Speaker 1:

Bunsen hates chipmunks Because they natter at him. Yeah, when he was little, I took him on a hike in the mountains. You were skiing with Adam and a chipmunk threw crap at him and, oh, he's hated chipmunks ever since. He does not like chipmunks and he does not like squirrels.

Speaker 2:

But Beaker is super cute because she can triangulate the squirrel in the tree when we're on walks and they're up in the tree.

Speaker 1:

If I let her, she could probably catch a squirrel. She's smart, they're fast, but they don't have a Beaker brain.

Speaker 2:

No, she has a Beaker brain, that's for sure. Can you tell me a little bit more about the squirrel inspired robot?

Speaker 1:

a little bit more about the squirrel inspired robot. I've talked about squirrels before on the science podcast and they it's hard to really understand unless you look at the math of how they move. And the agility of squirrels borders on precognition. The squirrel can do advanced physics. Obviously it's not crunching numbers in its head, but it knows how far it can jump and it knows as it runs on a branch how much spring the branch will have and when they land how much spring the other branch will get, because it allows them to do those death defying leaps from tree to tree. And obviously we've created robots that mimic lots of different types of moving. There's like weird crawling robots, I've seen a few swimming robots, we have flying ones like drones and of course the Atlas robot and the Flint, like the little dog robot at Spark.

Speaker 2:

It's cute. Yeah, it's so cute.

Speaker 1:

But, definitely not parkouring around the science center cute but definitely not parkouring around the science center. No, in fact, like boston, dynamics has a good clip video I show the kids of their robots just eating crap over and over again as they got better like from. They walk and they fall over. They just eat it. And so biologists and engineers at uc berkeley are using squirrel biomechanics to build a robot that can jump like a squirrel.

Speaker 2:

But the key to the hopping robot is that it can stick the landing on a narrow perch, so they were able to create agile robots and agile robots could land on the flat ground but not on the perch. Then those agile robots are capable of navigating areas like construction sites or forest canopies and also disaster zones. So, looking inside like broken walls and inside the plumbing, maybe for people who are trapped underneath.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, most of those robots that move around. They are really limited with how they can move based on the ground, and if they have to jump over a thing, most can't do it. That's not what I'm built for, like R2-D2, right? Do you remember R2-D2 from Star Wars?

Speaker 2:

I do.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so the original movies, r2-d2 couldn't do much of anything. He could go up and down stairs, like they showed how he could do that, but if he had to jump, I was always like, oh, he's screwed, he can't do anything. And then the prequels came along and they gave R2-D2 like rocket jets so he could just fly. And they gave R2-D2 like rocket jets so he could just fly. And I was like, oh okay, I see they just kind of retconned his ability to jump over gaps and things like that. All right, so if you're going to build a robot to work like a squirrel, chris, what does it have to be able to do? What do squirrels have going for them?

Speaker 2:

Okay, squirrels are like the most agile mammal, they absorb 86% of their landing energy with their front legs. So basically they're doing front handstands and they use their foot pads to grasp and twist, which manages torque to avoid over or under shooting. And this is so important. They're adjusting of the braking force mid-landing. They can correct for imbalances, so if they're undershooting they reduce the braking force, which allows their inertia to swing them up, and if they're on an overshooting trajectory they increase their braking force to slow momentum. And, unlike monkeys, they don't have that articulated thumb, so they just basically land on their pad, which allows them, like, surprisingly, they don't have to grasp and then ungrasp, they just use the pad to maneuver.

Speaker 1:

And that's where the robot comes in. So the robot used in the study to mimic squirrel movement is called SALTO. That's cute and that's an acronym, of course, for Saltatorial Agile Locomotion on Terrain Obstacles. But they've been proving it ever since, and this is where our story picks up. So Salto was redesigned to modulate leg force on landing. So it's previously not possible. That's like, of course, what you mentioned, chris, the absorption of the jump right. So it doesn't like just land hard, torque breaking, similar to how squirrels use their legs despite no gripping ability, because Salto doesn't have little cute squirrel hands. They were able to get Salto to land upright on a branch multiple times and they used reaction wheels and torque control so it didn't tip over. They literally got this little hoppy robot to hop from a stable ground onto a branch, which is crazy. They did give it little grippy things. They're like little low friction passive grippers on its feet.

Speaker 2:

That's amazing. And so now there's applications actually beyond the Earth. There is a NASA funded project to build a onelegged robot for exploring a moon of saturn, and low gravity on this moon would allow the robot to hop the length of a football field in one jump just a hopping robot on, probably in cell, is in cell, it is right yeah, it's in cell of us that's funny and we forgot to mention salto only had one leg.

Speaker 1:

You might wonder why? Because one leg seems risky, but for jumping it's just way better for a robot. They don't have to think about two pistons or two like springs. You just have all your power into a single leg for a big old jump and then if it's around you just have to hop around on one foot like a big jump. But that's what they.

Speaker 2:

that's what they found when they watch the squirrels motion. So they did stop motion photography to analyze how the squirrel does it, and it is basically a one foot jump.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, big pogo stick. All right, very cool. You should probably YouTube search Salto jumping. It's pretty cute. It's like a little legged robot hopping around and, of course, if they do send this thing in the next 20 years like an advanced version of this to hop around on Saturn's moons, you can bet there's going to be video footage of that.

Speaker 2:

I can't wait to see it. I'm not great at jumping.

Speaker 1:

I'm jealous of Salto's ability to jump.

Speaker 2:

Jason, when you were in high school, you wanted to do a dunk, and so you practiced every day, and then you bought those jumping shoes.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I brought these weird platform shoes and I did plyometrics in them for months and guess what I could finally do? You could dunk. I had a straight runaway and I didn't dribble one out of five times. I could dunk a volleyball no problem In the last, like last couple of months of my peak physical abilities in grade 12, because I could palm the ball. That was. The big problem was I had to jump high enough that I could scoop the ball above my head and then push it down. But a volleyball I could palm, and then it was, and then push it down, but a volleyball I could palm, and then it was. I actually could dunk that no problem, which is wild, because there's no way I could do that today. No way.

Speaker 2:

I think you could. I think it's just like riding a bike.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, If I practice for another year, I'm no Salto. That's science news for this week. This week in pet science, we're going to go back to the pandemic Chris.

Speaker 2:

Oh, I wanted to like forget the pandemic. I wanted to put it behind us.

Speaker 1:

I know you know a lot of people, of course, lost their jobs and people got real sick and people died and lost people. They care about Our family, though. We did some stuff during the pandemic that I still think about today. That was cool, like you and Adam were at home every day and went into my school to work and teach because our internet couldn't handle all three of us doing online stuff at the same time.

Speaker 2:

It absolutely could not.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and you got to hang out with the dogs, which I was jealous about, I think. Sometimes I took the dogs with me, or a dog with me, and then we, every night, we would watch like television as a family. That was cool. Or we'd play board games that was cool.

Speaker 2:

So there are some good things that did come out of the pandemic and lots of opportunity for study. This study investigated whether pets provided emotional comfort to children during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the focus was examining the link between children's attachment to pets and their perceived comfort from those pets, and whether the link was moderated by the children's treatment of animals.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and you know what? That's something that Adam mentioned to me the other day is like he was alone but he had dogs like he. He had bunsen and beaker. We didn't have bernoulli at that time, um, and he got to hang out with the dogs and they got to hang out with him, which was cool. Um, I remember him he actually mentioned that the other day just how much he liked hanging out with the dogs during covid. But of course, adam is a data point of one, so let's get into what's going on in the study.

Speaker 2:

That's right, adam was a research of one, our own research but what they found is that there is lots of research for adult well-being during COVID-19, but limited research exploring the pet's impact or influence on children. What we do know is that COVID-19 negatively affected children's mental health and it has manifested in anxiety, depression, sleep issues and behavioral difficulties. So one of those triggers or contributing things was social isolation, because schools were closed and they couldn't hang out with their friends, and that increased children's reliance on pets for companionship. And the pet attachment in children does have parallels with human attachment theory, which we have covered on the podcast. Pets can offer proximity, security and emotional regulation pets can offer proximity, security and emotional regulation.

Speaker 1:

So the hypothesis of this study was that higher pet attachment in children might be associated with a greater perceived comfort from pets during COVID-19. So if you're more attached to your pet, that pet will give you more comfort. And as we have a data point of one of Adam, adam is pretty attached to the dogs.

Speaker 2:

He sure is.

Speaker 1:

And Beaker especially. Beaker really likes Adam, not that Bunsen doesn't, but Beaker's like super cuddly with Adam, which is cute.

Speaker 2:

So cute, but the children's treatment of animals also moderates that relationship the association with greater perceived comfort from pets during COVID-19. 685 parents of children aged 5 to 18 years old, so 601 were female, 72 male and some others preferred not to say and it was designed as a cross-sectional online survey because this was taken during the pandemic, so due to the pandemic restrictions, they couldn't have people come in and so the recruitment was through social media platforms and charity networks. So if you were to be involved, that's how you learned about it. They used several scales. They used the pet attachment scale and the parent report and they also used the children's treatment of animals questionnaire and, lastly, they had a newly developed scale called the comfort from pets during COVID-19 scale that was developed for this study.

Speaker 1:

A couple of key findings probably make sense. The more pet attachment that children had, the more comfort that they got from their animals and children's treatment of animals significantly moderated the attachment comfort link and this was seen strongest in kids who had the fewest positive behaviors towards pets, seen strongest in kids who had the fewest positive behaviors towards pets the kids that had the lowest positive behaviors towards pets. They had way less attachment and then comfort from said pet. Girls showed higher pet attachment and more positive treatment of animals than boys, and older kids had higher levels of attachment and better treatment and greater comfort than younger kids.

Speaker 2:

Now children with pets other than dogs or cats, so rabbits or guinea pigs and birds showed higher levels of attachment, better treatment and greater comfort.

Speaker 1:

Isn't that interesting. I saw that too that kids with like rabbits and birds especially they had the highest levels of attachment and the greatest comfort from those animals you wouldn't really think gave you the same kind of affection as a dog or a cat.

Speaker 2:

I can tell you right now, but birds are super affectionate. They are, unless. It's named Oshkosh Bogosh and is Duncan's bird and he was evil, but the turtles didn't show any comfort.

Speaker 1:

No, they're not on the list, Chris.

Speaker 2:

They're not on the list, but you know what I liked? I liked watching them swim, that's very relaxing.

Speaker 1:

Even people with fish. The fish helps mental health too, just from looking at them. So the good thing about this study is it's not just adam. It's a large, diverse sample size, though definitely skewed towards girls, and while it happened so long ago during the pandemic, as studies do, it takes a long time to go through the data and process it and get your study published. So, yes, this study literally just came out in time for us to do it on the podcast this week as parent reported data. Rather than asking the kids, you might get a little different response. Just came out in time for us to do it on the podcast this week. It's parent-reported data. Rather than asking the kids, you might get a little different response if you ask the kids.

Speaker 2:

The implications of this study indicate that pets likely served as emotional supports and social companions during COVID-19 for those kids. Educational interventions on animal welfare and empathy may support both the child and the pet well-being and there is potential application beyond COVID-19 to other stressful or isolating circumstances for children, so these skills could transfer over.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, like winters in Canada, when it's too cold to go outside because you might die. That's a type of isolating circumstances.

Speaker 2:

It is, and I just burrow down with the dogs.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, Bernoulli sure is a cuddly guy. Hey, he likes to cuddle too.

Speaker 2:

He did. I saw you in the bedroom and he was with you and I was so jealous. I was like aw, you're so lucky.

Speaker 1:

He finds me and we cuddle together. He's a cool dog. All right, that's Pet Science for this week. That's the end of this week's show. Thanks for coming back week after week to listen to the Science Podcast, and a special shout out to our top tier patrons on the Paw Pack Plus. That's our community that supports the show. We'd love for you to join, and a perk is Chris reads your name out. I'd also like to give a warning. The pre-sales for the Bernoulli stuffy probably will be starting April 2nd, so you're going to want to check our website. All right, chris, let's hear those patron names.

Speaker 2:

Amelia Fettig Rhi, oda Carol Hainel, jennifer Challen, linnea Janik Karen Chronister, vicky Otero, christy Walker, sarah Bram, wendy, diane Mason and Luke Helen Chin, elizabeth Bourgeois, marianne McNally, catherine Jordan, shelley Smith, laura Steffensen, tracy Leinbach, anne Uchida, heather Burbach, kelly Tracy Halberg, ben Rather, debbie Anderson, sandy Brimer, mary Rader, bianca Hyde, andrew Lin, brenda Clark, brianne Hawes, peggy McKeel, holly Burge, kathy Zerker, susan Wagner and Liz Button.

Speaker 1:

For science, empathy and cuteness.