(PhysOrg.com) -- Since the days of Leonardo da Vinci people have tried to build machines that fly with flapping wings like a bird or an insect. Even in the jet age the idea remains attractive because ...

Birds fly more efficiently by folding their wings during the upstroke, according to a recent study. The results could mean that wing-folding is the next step in increasing the propulsive and ...

In the search for better ways to fly, researchers have long pondered the question: Which is a better system -- the flapping wings of birds and insects, or the fixed wings of your average 747? The ...

Insects are thought to use specific chest muscles to actively open and close their wings. However, high-speed imaging reveals that rhinoceros beetles flap their hindwings to deploy them for flight, ...

The way bugs and birds flap their wings may look effortless, but the dynamics that keep them aloft are dizzyingly complex and difficult to quantify. Cornell researchers created a computational model ...

There are no powered spinning propellers in nature. When evolution has found an advantage to producing thrust in a fluid, it has done it mainly by flapping things back and forth. This new VTOL ...

Bio-inspired wind sensing using strain sensors on flexible wings could revolutionize robotic flight control strategy. Researchers have developed a method to detect wind direction with 99% accuracy ...

Taking their cues from the birds, Airbus engineers have flown a scale-model airplane that incorporates flapping wing-tips. Based on the structure of the albatross wing, the remote-controlled ...

Jerry Seinfeld launched his career with Bee Movie, an insect-themed animated feature that took the world by storm in 2007. It posed the quandary – that supposedly, according to all known laws of ...

Archaeopteryx was a flapper, not just a glider. The shape of the ancient bird’s wing bones suggests it was capable of short bursts of active, flapping flight, similar to how modern birds like ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- According to a new Cornell study, an optimized flapping wing could actually require 27 percent less power than its optimal steady-flight counterpart at small scales. In the search for ...