Since the dawn of aviation, birds have been an inspiration for visionaries of flight. And now, engineers are once again looking to feathered friends to inspire the next generation of aircraft wings.

Tiny drones could one day crawl through collapsed buildings to help find survivors after earthquakes. These micro-robots, ...

Asterixis is a disorder in which a person loses motor control of some parts of the body. It is commonly called flapping hand tremor because the muscles in the fingers and the wrists are typically ...

Small migrating birds save energy as they fly. Large birds, such as storks, save energy on the flight to their wintering grounds by soaring through the air on thermal currents. Until now, however, we ...

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 ...

Although wing-flapping micro-drones do already exist, the things tend to be quite fragile – and thus not ideally suited to real-world use. An experimental new one, however, utilizes a softer mechanism ...

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 ...

The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology. Mispronunciations can occur. We are working with our partners to continually review and improve the results. The Andean condor ...