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 ...

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 ...

Many insects fly synchronously, matching the nervous system pulses to wing movement. But smaller insects don’t have the mechanics for this and must flap their wings harder, which works only up to a ...

To address this, the researchers used a flight simulator system that allowed individual moths to fly in any direction while attached to a tether ( Dreyer et al., 2021 ). The researchers were able to ...

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 ...

A team of experimental neurobiologists and theoretical biologists has managed to solve a mystery that has been baffling scientists for decades. They have been able to determine the nature of the ...

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 ...

WASHINGTON, May 9, 2023 – The mountain pine beetle is one of the main causes of tree mortality in the pine forests of North America. For example, the insect has killed thousands of acres of pine ...