How Fast Can a Human Run? — New York Times 🔗 🏃‍♀️ 🏃 🐎 💨

Two legs are good. Four legs might be better.

Of course, humans are fully capable of running on four limbs without any magical help. A 2016 paper by Ryuta Kinugasa and Yoshiyuki Usami noted that the Guinness World Record for a human running 100 meters on all fours has improved from 18.58 seconds in 2008 (the first year the record was tracked) to 15.71 seconds in 2015. The researchers extrapolated from this rapid rate of improvement to make one of the stranger predictions published in a scientific paper: That by 2048, a person on all fours could go faster than a person running upright.