The Wright Brothers studied bird flight before they designed the first airplane. Now modern aircraft fly higher and faster than any bird, yet no manufactured device matches the graceful movements and ...

'Directional Velcro' on birds' feathers prevent gaps from forming between them when hit by a gust of wind. Courtesy of Lentink Lab / Stanford University It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s… a bit of both.

The structures zipping together the barbs in bird feathers could provide a model for new adhesives and new aerospace materials, according to a new study. Researchers 3D printed models of the ...

Ever since the first humans saw birds gracefully soaring through the sky above their heads, we have been asking two questions: how do they do that, and how can we learn to do that? Centuries of ...

Dark feathers may help birds fly more efficiently. They heat up the animals’ wings and the surrounding air, which might help increase airflow over the wing. Svana Rogalla at Ghent University in ...

Pigeons may be considered rats of the sky, but some scientists have found greater value in these urban birds: the blueprint for a new generation of flying machines. Birds can modify the shape of their ...

A robot that resembles a pigeon and can make tight turns like real birds may point to the future of aerospace engineering – a continuously morphing wing. Understanding exactly how birds fly has always ...

Birds can fly— at least, most of them can. Flightless birds like penguins and ostriches have evolved lifestyles that don’t require flight. However, there’s a lot that scientists don’t know about how ...