Lucy was in well into her 80's when I noticed that her walking balance wasn't what it used to be -- in most situations. The one exception was while grocery shopping. By leaning on a rolling grocery cart, she was hard to keep up with. The cart offered her stability that restored (and even improved) her mobility. That's when I got her one of those fancy rolling walkers, the kind with hand brakes like those on racing bicycles.

Fancy walkers might not be the only solution for folks with compromised balance and stability while walking. A research team at the University of Houston is investigating an unlikely alternative that they believe might be the answer to deteriorating balance for the elderly.

Biomechanics professor Max Kurz and his team looked to the animal kingdom for clues to the elderly balance problems caused by deteriorating nervous systems. They came up with, are you ready for this, penguins. Kurz and company observed penguins walking on a runway and hypothesized the side-to-side motion of waddling might help balance.

I think that it means that waddling possibly may be a mechanism to introduce stability and possibly we'll be able to introduce this to humans is wha"t we're hoping," he said.

They're starting with college students, teaching them to waddle like penguins. They hope to learn if this sort of training might help those with mobility problems keep their stability. A researcher at another medical center finds the approach interesting and "perhaps could help prevent her patients from falling."

And maybe save on grocery carts.