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.

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.

Analysis of an unusual Brazilian fossil has led U.S. researchers to link microscopic fossil features to bird feather colors. The fossil has dramatic black and white banding patterns that have been interpreted as post-fossilization bacterial activity. However, there are structures in the rock in which it was found that are the same size and shape as cells from living dark feathers.