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
Tag: insect flight
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
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
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
Mimicking Insect Flight
There’s an oft-repeated tale that science cannot explain how a bumblebee flies. And while that may have been true 80 years ago, when engineers assumed they could apply their knowledge Keep reading
Flying Beetles, Stinging Nettles, and Jellyfish
In the latest JFM/FYFD video, we tackle some of the less pleasant aspects of summer weather: stopping invasive insects, understanding how plants dispense poison, and looking at the physics behind Keep reading
How Mosquitoes Fly in the Rain
One might think that rainfall would keep the mosquitoes away, but it turns out that rain strikes don’t bother these little pests much. Because the insect is so small and Keep reading