About 350 million years ago, our planet witnessed the evolution of the first flying creatures. They are still around, and some of them continue to annoy us with their buzzing. While scientists have ...

Scientific consensus is that high oxygen levels allowed these humongous fliers to exist, but a new study throws that idea ...

The problem with diffusion is that it’s notoriously slow. The oxygen constraint hypothesis argued that the larger the insect ...

Scientists rethink why giant insects once ruled the skies, finding oxygen may not explain their size or disappearance.

Three hundred million years ago, dragonfly-like creatures with wingspans stretching 70 centimeters patrolled the skies of a ...

Robots helped achieve a major breakthrough in our understanding of how insect flight evolved. The study is a result of a six-year long collaboration between roboticists and biophysicists. Robots built ...

Mosquitoes are some of the fastest-flying insects. Flapping their wings more than 800 times a second, they achieve their speed because the muscles in their wings can flap faster than their nervous ...

When I was little, I loved chasing butterflies. It’s fun to run after them as they flit and flutter. But I didn’t eat them. I asked my friend Rich Zack if that was an oversight. He’s an insect ...

The structure of fibrillar flight muscle / D.E. Ashhurst and M.J. Cullen -- Extraction, purification, and localization of [alpha]-actinin from asynchronous insect flight muscle / D.E. Goll [and others ...

Three-hundred-million years ago, Earth was very different. The continents had coalesced into Pangea, which was dominated in ...

Scientists thought giant dragonflies couldn’t survive in today’s atmosphere – but a study of dozens of insect species shows ...