Plants and their pollinators must interact with changing airflow while simultaneously interacting as individual organisms. For flying pollinators, this includes flight through gusts and performing complex aerial maneuvers. Recent studies have begun to explore how these animals alter behavior in response to unsteady air, but we do not know if these conditions represent the local […]
The leading-edge vortex (LEV) is a well-known flight mechanism used by flapping insects, but the interplay between the bound LEV and the flexible wing it attaches to is not yet understood. On rigid wings, the LEV bursts but remains attached at Re~O(103), however this has not been seen on flexible insect wings in the same […]
Animals such as cockroaches must coordinate the movements of multiple legs, which are coupled components of a complex hybrid-dynamical system, in order to stably run. Coordination could be achieved through a decentralized control architecture, where a motor command for a particular muscle is only informative of the variation of the local states of the limb, […]
Hawkmoths naturally hover and feed from flowers in nature. Insects have developed an assortment of unsteady aerodynamic mechanisms to generate the high-lift necessary for hovering. While feeding, hawkmoths rely on precise wing kinematics to not only remain aloft, but also track the motion of flowers as they sway in the wind. Previous work revealed that […]
How does the action of millions of molecular motors enable muscle, nature’s most versatile material, to power movement?One of the features that makes muscle so unique is the exquisite organization of millions of molecular motors into a highly regular protein lattice. Muscles contract via the interaction of many parallel protein fibers (actin & myosin) that […]
