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 ...

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 ...

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.

Stick insects may have done what biologists once thought was impossible: lose something as complicated as a wing in the course of evolution but recover it millions of years later. That’s not supposed ...

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 ...

Thrips don't rely on lift in order to fly. Instead, the tiny insects rely on a drag-based flight mechanism, staying afloat in airflow velocities with a large ratio of force to wing size. Researchers ...

As a flying machine, a mosquito is not efficient, but since its weight is low it gets 450 million miles per gallon of nectar, which it uses as fuel. In the Scientific Monthly, Professor Brian Hocking ...

Tiny wings and tinier solar cells allow autonomous movement in a new robotic “bee.” By Knvul Sheikh For years now, scientists have sought to build aerial robots inspired by bees and other flying ...

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 ...