France's military is exploring bird-mimicking, flapping-wing drones (BIOFLY project) to enhance stealth, camouflage, and confuse adversaries in military applications. The BIOFLY drone, weighing about ...

Robotics researchers regularly turn to the natural world for inspiration, and those working on machines that fly are no different. An international team of scientists has taken this approach to ...

Robot aircraft–UAVs–are going to be big news in the future of warfighting, as the reveal of the U.K.’s new one proves. But have you thought about tiny UAVs for spying? Check out this robot insect to ...

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 ...

In this undated photo provided by Facundo Vital in July 2020, an Andean condor soars above the Patagonian steppe in Argentina. To birds, the sky is not empty, but a landscape of invisible features – ...

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.

LATER this year a team led by Adrian Thomas, a professor of biomechanics at the University of Oxford’s Department of Zoology, will try to break the human-powered water speed record. The aim is to ...

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope just caught the “bat shadow” of a newborn star moving — a sight the space agency evocatively compared to a pair of flapping bat wings. The star, called HBC 672 and ...