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.

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 ...

Using robotic and animal models, researchers have shown that some dinosaurs were already flapping their rudimentary wings as a side effect of running, prior to evolving the ability to fly. The finding ...

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 ...

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 ...