About 350 million years ago, our planet witnessed the evolution of the first flying creatures. They are still around, and some of them continue to annoy us with their buzzing. While scientists have ...

Robots helped achieve a major breakthrough in our understanding of how insect flight evolved. The study is a result of a six-year long collaboration between roboticists and biophysicists. Robots built ...

In most developing tissues, signals called morphogens act like lighthouses, guiding nearby cells toward their fate and telling them what to become. Each cell relies on such signals for organized ...

Many insects fly synchronously, matching the nervous system pulses to wing movement. But smaller insects don’t have the mechanics for this and must flap their wings harder, which works only up to a ...

Different insects flap their wings in different manners. Understanding the variations between these modes of flight may help scientists design better and more efficient flying robots in the future.

Mechanical flying insects can soon be made using printers. Increasingly, so-called 3-D printers are being used to make items out of plastic, metal, glass, ceramic, even sugar and mashed potatoes. They ...

Within two years, researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle, intend to flight-test a package of commercial flight control sensors on the RoboFly, which already has advanced the field of ...

Mosquitoes are some of the fastest-flying insects. Flapping their wings more than 800 times a second, they achieve their speed because the muscles in their wings can flap faster than their nervous ...