Researchers observed hummingbirds using 12 high-speed cameras, 6 pressure plates and 2176 microphones. The soft and complex feathered wings generate sound in a fashion similar to how the simpler wings ...

We may be fascinated by the glowing aura of fireflies gently lighting up a summer evening — but their flashing lights aren’t for us. Instead, these bright bursts are a form of communication. Other ...

About 65 million years ago, right around the time dinosaurs went extinct, bats evolved the ability to echolocate. They would produce clicks with their mouth or nose and listen for echoes of those ...

The hinge enables insects to control their wing movements, but how it works is hard to study. Multidisciplinary research, using imaging and machine-learning methods, now sheds light on the mechanism ...

Insect wings represent a pivotal evolutionary innovation that has underpinned the remarkable radiation of the Insecta. This field, at the intersection of evolution and developmental biology (evo-devo) ...

Western biologists have developed an innovative way to reconstruct how crickets sing, based on the physical formation of the chirping insects' wings, using measurements from preserved samples and ...

A group of treehoppers sit on a plant stem in University of Missouri Professor Rex Cocroft's lab. Humans can't hear the vibrations these insects use to communicate with, but Cocroft has been able to ...

The vast majority of living insects either have wings or evolved from flying ancestors, said Linz, an evolutionary biologist now at Indiana University. “When the average person thinks about an insect ...

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.

A handful of new studies moves the needle toward a consensus on the long-disputed question of whether insect wings evolved from legs or from the body wall, but the devil is in the details. For more ...

The hummingbird is named after its pleasant humming sound when it hovers in front of flowers to feed. But only now has it become clear how the wing generates the hummingbird's namesake sound when it ...