Scientists at Imperial College in London have flies on their minds. "Anyone who has watched one fly chasing another at incredibly high speed, without crashing or bumping into anything, can appreciate the high-end flight performance of these animals,” Dr. Holger Krapp of the Department of Bioengineering said in an Imperial College news release.¹

The lowly milkweed has presented a challenge to the evolutionary assumption that life forms become ever more complex in response to environmental pressures.

New research may change conventional thinking on fossil diversity and extinction rates.¹ John Alroy, a researcher at the University of California Santa Barbara, and 34 other scientists recently completed a 10-year study on the subject, published in the journal Science.²

For decades, human design engineers have been laboring to make more efficient machines, like propeller blades that produce steady airflow patterns. Our thinking has been fixed on the idea that smooth surfaces are the best basic form, but studies on whales and dolphins are changing that.