Archives: Flight

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Flight school

Our research on hummingbird flight is featured in the July 2017 National Geographic! The article is all about hummingbird science, and how new techniques are allowing us to see aspects of their behaviour that aren’t available to the unaided eye. You can read the print article here, see a beautiful video summary here, and another one here.... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Bird-inspired drones

This Christmas the strong winds decorated the trees with shiny new drones: (photo by Rod Croskery) Drones of the future are going to get a lot more maneuverable. A group at Imperial College London has now built an aquatic diving drone with wings that can tuck in for protection during rapid plunges, inspired by the... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Hummingbird agility depends on raw muscle power

Paolo Segre and I were invited to write this blog post on our latest hummingbird study! The study, published in eLife, is here. From January 15,... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Animating time series in R

 Frame-blending is a great way to illustrate animal behaviour and other things that change over time. This got me thinking about ways to animate time series data. In R, the animation package has lots of options, but you can also build your own just by plotting over the same device window. If you save each iteration in... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Hummingbird in the rain

It was a rainy day here at the Los Angeles Arboretum in Arcadia, California, and the peafowl were hunkered down. The hummingbirds were out though! A male Selasphorus hummingbird stretches and shakes in the rain. Filmed at 240 fps, played back at 1/8 real speed.   From March 20,... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Species of serendipity

Like most ideas, this one arrived in the shower. I needed to write a post for this week, but my list of topics was wearing thin and the weather is finally starting to get nice enough to distract me. Sure, I had a few promising ideas lined up, but they all need more time... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Quirks, quarks and quantum sailboats

An old mystery from my days as a sailor resurfaced this week. Does air on one side of the sail somehow know what the air on the other side is doing? Sounds strange, but it happens to be a key part of explaining how boats, birds and airplanes work, and it stumps a whole... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Groupthink

Which animal would use Facebook most, if it could? My poll in class last week was a popular one – a fact that I couldn’t properly enjoy, since Charlie came up with it for me in a fit of brain-dead incapacity. Charlie’s Facebook question elicited chirps of excitement, compliments and even a few drawings... More

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