At the end of just about every commercial airliner’s wings is an important piece of technology that can be easy to miss. The small upturned tips of each wing are called winglets, and although they ...

"Most previous studies suggest that insulation might have been the primary function for the first feathers, but our discovery supports that display represents one of the earliest functions for ...

Birds of a feather may flock together, but the feathers of birds differ altogether. New research from an international team led by USC scientists set out to learn how feathers developed and helped ...

A paper published last year in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface described a feather as a masterpiece of engineering, one comprising nine orders of magnitude, from the nanoscale to the meter ...

The natural marvels, which do everything from enabling acrobatic flight to insulating against Antarctic cold, continue to inspire new designs and technologies Ian Rose At the end of just about every ...