This week, an ankle brace that improves walking.

What we kind of wanted to try to do is leapfrog evolution, if you like, in making the structure of the body more efficient.

And making quantum physics work on big things. Well, not huge, but atom-sized.

So it is a true experimental challenge to have atoms behave truly in a quantum way.

Plus getting social scientists more involved with climate change. This is the Nature Podcast for April

the 2nd, 2015. I'm Kerry Smith.

And I'm Adam Levy.

Our species is really good at walking.

We spent millions of years evolving a well-tuned system of bones and muscles for putting one foot in front of the other.

And we get loads of practice at it.

The average person takes more than 5,000 steps a day.

So what on earth made Stephen Collins think he could do better? He designed a mechanical exoskeleton to make

walking even more efficient. Jeff Marsh gave him a call.

Of all the questions that scientists can put their minds to, what made you go for,

how can I improve walking?

Well, I guess I became interested in the problem as a young student working on walking robots,

which tend to be 10 to 100 times less efficient than humans. And actually we discovered some ways of using the natural dynamics of legs to make robots

more efficient. And so as I moved on in my research, I wanted to see if we could take some of these

ideas and apply them to devices that help people with disabilities.

So this is a study on helping healthy people,

but we think that the techniques we discover will have use to assistive devices.

And you mentioned there that when you were working on robotics,

...