Flight

For the first time, scientists have discovered that hippos get significant airtime when they're at full-trot, able to lift their huge barrel-shaped girth off the ground for around 15% of their stride. It's totally unique for mammals their size.

In a first, scientists have found that painted lady butterflies use favorable winds and a strategy of active flying and autopilot to cross the world nonstop. The flight, spanning five-to-eight days, takes up to half the adventurous animals' adult life.

Even young, healthy passengers put their heart health at risk when they consume alcohol before sleeping on a flight, particularly a long-haul flight, according to a new study. The researchers say it's an underestimated risk that could easily be avoided.

There aren't any organizations other than NASA that can claim they are operating on two different planets. The space agency is now using that reach to create better helicopter blades on Earth and to push its copter to greater heights on Mars.

If you were a bird, chances are that you'd want to minimize the number of times you had to land on the treacherous ocean. A new study now suggests that multiple seabird species have thus evolved dark-colored wings, in order to stay aloft longer.

NASA has made history today, conducting the very first powered flight on another planet. The Mars Helicopter Ingenuity successfully took to the Red Planet skies for a brief jaunt, which will hopefully be the first of several.

If a drone were to inadvertently end up upside-down while flying, it would be good if the aircraft could automatically flip itself back over again, to avoid crashing. Such may someday be the case, thanks to a recent study on dragonfly flight.

One of the challenges in designing micro air vehicles lies in the fact that if their battery is big enough to provide much range, it's too heavy for them to carry. Scientists have developed an alternative, in the form of a sun-powered flapping wing.

Like the Wright Brothers, evolution didn’t get flight exactly right the first time. It takes experimentation to find the best design, and now palaeontologists have found one of nature’s quirky side projects – a strange dinosaur that was covered in feathers but had leathery bat-like wings.

On the timeline of the evolution of flight in birds, gliding seems like a logical first step. But new research suggests that some species could have made the jump straight to flapping flight without a gliding phase in the meantime, which could force a rewrite of our understanding of avian evolution.

​Carried by the wind, dandelion seeds can travel enormous distances of more than a kilometer (0.6 miles). Now, researchers at The University of Edinburgh have discovered that this is thanks to a remarkable form of flight never before seen in nature.

The dinosaur Archaeopteryx is widely regarded as one of the earliest ancestors of modern birds, but the question of whether or not it could actively fly has been debated for decades. Now, scientists have taken X-ray scans of fossil specimens, and concluded that the answer is yes – sort of.