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.

Some insects can flap their wings so rapidly that it’s impossible for instructions from their brains to entirely control the behaviour. Building tiny flapping robots has helped researchers shed light ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Insect wings represent a pivotal evolutionary innovation that has underpinned the remarkable radiation of the Insecta. This field, at the intersection of evolution and developmental biology (evo-devo) ...

Classification of insects and their wingbeat kinematics -- Wingbeats and vorticity -- Evolution of flight in the insect orders -- Problems of endopterygote insect ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

Beetle wings are often hidden. Nestled behind armored shields on the beetle’s back, they unfurl in whirring sheets, whisking their clumsy owners from danger. Beetles don’t have more than two sets of ...

Insect life-cycle polymorphism : introduction / S. Masaki and W. Wipking -- Diversity and integration of life-cycle controls in insects / H.V. Danks -- Seasonal plasticity and life-cycle adaptations ...