The Ikhana unmanned aircraft system has been used by NASA last year to fight wildfires from the sky and this month to provide images of current Californian wildfires to authorities (link to NASA ...

(Nanowerk News) A team of engineers has built and tested a radically new kind of airplane wing, assembled from hundreds of tiny identical pieces. The wing can change shape to control the plane’s ...

A new type of airplane wing assembled like a jigsaw puzzle could make for lighter, more efficient aircraft. NASA and Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers tested the wing design in a NASA ...

If you've had a window seat next to the wing of an airplane, you've probably watched as flaps on the wing engage and disengage as a plane takes off and lands. That's because in each phase of flight -- ...

An analysis of hoverfly flight shows that wing design, not faster flapping, enables the smallest species to generate enough lift to fly. The study, published today in eLife as the final Version of ...

A team of mathematicians has determined the ideal wing shape for fast flapping flight -- a discovery that offers promise for better methods for harvesting energy from water as well as for enhancing ...

Humans have long drawn inspiration from bird wings to design mechanical ones—and now a team of mathematicians has taken this biomimicry to a new level. By 3-D-printing a variety of wing shapes, racing ...

Equally plausible arguments can be made that evolution is not constrained by mutation. The influence of natural selection in evolution is evident in the fit of phenotypes to environments throughout ...

A new type of airplane wing assembled like a jigsaw puzzle could make for lighter, more efficient aircraft. NASA and Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers tested the wing design in a NASA ...

Samples of the dorsal (middle column) and ventral (left column) sides of wings from bird specimens analyzed by the researchers. The right column depicts a consensus wing shape generated by analyzing ...

Bird dispersal movements are thought to depend on complex demographic and genetic factors. Researchers show that there may be a simpler explanation: bird dispersal distances depend on the morphology ...