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Biomechanics is the scientific study of the mechanics of living structures, or of non-living structures such as silk or nacre that are produced by organisms.
The fastest animals are neither the largest, nor the smallest, but rather intermediately sized, though the mechanism for this is unknown. This study built predictive musculoskeletal simulations, scaled in mass from the size of a mouse to an elephant to understand the underlying mechanisms.
Inspired by mechanoreceptors on flying insects, a flapping-wing drone that makes use of strain sensors on the wings and reinforcement-learning-based flight control has been developed. The drone can fly in various unsteady environments, including in windy conditions.
Digital particle image velocimetry and force measurements in a water channel provide evidence that leading-edge vortices could be exploited by earliest vertebrates to colonize the water column more than 400 Mya.
An article in Nature Materials describes the bioprinting of hydrogel force sensors directly into the tissues of live embryos to quantify the mechanical forces driving morphogenesis.
Certain air sacs have evolved in multiple lineages of soaring birds, and it emerges that these probably function to reduce the force required from the major flight muscles as they hold the wings in place during gliding and soaring.
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 that underlies its operation.
For a century, scientists pondered whether bird flight evolved by animals gliding down from trees or by creatures running and flapping from the ground up. A landmark 1974 paper reset the debate to focus on the evolution of the flight stroke instead.