A year ago I observed what a strange year 2020 had been, and in many ways, I could say the same of 2021. Before the pandemic, I spent quite a Keep reading
Tag: flapping flight
“In Flight”
Photographer Mark Harvey captured these stunning portraits of birds in flight. From acrobatic songbirds to soaring raptors, the images show the incredible morphology of a bird’s wing during flight. Most Keep reading
Moths in Flight
As student engineers, we often use fixed-wing aircraft to build our intuition for flight, but nature has so many other incredible examples to offer. Here we see high-speed video of Keep reading
Whiffling Geese
This wild photograph shows a goose flying upside down with its head turned 180 degrees in a behavior known as whiffling. In this orientation, the bird’s typical lift characteristics are Keep reading
Unusual Insects Taking Off
What do you do when you’re an insect researcher with a high-speed camera? Why, film all sorts of unusual insects from your backyard as they take off and fly! Here Keep reading
How the Hummingbird Got Its Hum
Summer hikes in the Rocky Mountains are frequently pierced by a hum that can deepen to a bomber-like buzz as hummingbirds flit by. They’re so small and fast that they’re Keep reading
Insect-Inspired Flight
Insects are incredibly agile and resilient fliers, capable of colliding and recovering without damage. Engineers are only beginning to capture these characteristics in their robots. Here, engineers use a soft Keep reading
Flexible Wings Aid Butterfly Flight
Butterflies are some of the oddest flyers of the insect world, given the large size of their wings relative to their bodies. That could be a recipe for inefficient flight, Keep reading
Adjusting for Gusts
In flight, birds must adjust quickly to wind gusts or risk crashing. Research shows that the structure of birds’ wings enables them to respond faster than their brains can. The Keep reading
Flying Through Waterfalls
Swifts and starlings often make their nests behind waterfalls. To explore how these birds traverse their watery curtain, researchers observed hummingbirds, a smaller sister species, flying through an artificial waterfall. Keep reading