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 ...

The structure of fibrillar flight muscle / D.E. Ashhurst and M.J. Cullen -- Extraction, purification, and localization of [alpha]-actinin from asynchronous insect flight muscle / D.E. Goll [and others ...

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 ...

The fusion of a living beetle and a tiny control backpack, also known as cyborg beetle, enables insect free-flight study. Using such a system, researchers from Nanyang Technological University, ...

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 ...

It’s not very common that a robot the size of a paper clip is able to do ten flips in eleven seconds and keep on course within five centimeters, says Markus Waibel of Waibel Robotics in Zurich. But ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I'm an American writer working in fiction and nonfiction. About 95% of insect species worldwide can fly. The question of what ...