Scientific consensus is that high oxygen levels allowed these humongous fliers to exist, but a new study throws that idea ...

Three-hundred-million years ago, Earth was very different. The continents had coalesced into Pangea, which was dominated in ...

Learn how ancient oxygen levels in the Paleozoic era were linked to giant insect size, and why that theory is now being ...

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 ...

When I was little, I loved chasing butterflies. It’s fun to run after them as they flit and flutter. But I didn’t eat them. I asked my friend Rich Zack if that was an oversight. He’s an insect ...

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 ...

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 ...

Insects first took to the skies about 350 million years ago, some 200 million years before birds first flapped their wings.

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 ...

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.

Researchers led by Nick Gravish, a faculty member in the UC San Diego Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, built a small flapper robot that operates in air. Robots built by engineers at ...