Cuckoos stay on course

With short hectic wing strokes that are hardly raised above the body, the flight of the cuckoo is not the height of elegance. Nevertheless, their wings carry them over 16,000 kilometres a year. Martin Wikelski from the Max ...

Students capture the flight of birds on very high-speed video

Stanford mechanical engineering professor David Lentink and his students capture slow-motion video from the fastest wings in the bird world, with an eye toward building flying robots that take design cues from Mother Nature.

Details of Yuri Gagarin's tragic death revealed

On the morning of April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin lifted off aboard Vostok 1 to become the first human in space, spending 108 minutes in orbit before landing via parachute in the Saratov region of the USSR. ...

Early birds had an old-school version of wings

In comparison to modern birds, the prehistoric Archaeopteryx and bird-like dinosaurs before them had a more primitive version of a wing. The findings, reported on November 21 in Current Biology, lend support to the notion ...

Passenger pigeons help to navigate

Many animals travel long distances in groups but little is known about how this may influence the navigational skills of individuals.

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