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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Tiny flying robots have always faced a brutal trade-off between agility and battery life, burning through power just to stay ...

Micro air vehicle developers should emulate the way insects fly, London conference told Emulating insects may be the best way forward for micro air vehicles (MAVs), according to engineers presenting ...

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 ...