Monthly Archives: October 2011

The Physics of Paper Planes

We’ve seen many different gliders from the animal world throughout this course. But as children, our first experiences with gliding probably came from paper planes. As a kid, I remember learning lots of different designs for planes, in an effort to make them fly farther and stay in the air longer. But there are actually […]

Fly Like a… Bar-Headed Goose?

Have you ever seen a movie where birds are flying directly next to an airplane? Probably, but obviously in the real world, it could never happen. However, there are some birds that do fly above those nimbus clouds. The bar-headed goose. Magnificent and graceful, these geese migrate over Mount Everest every winter. Mount Everest capped […]

Driving “Above” The Influence

Ever wonder if the Jetsons were the only ones with flying cars? Wouldn’t it be nice to escape the two dimensional world of traffic? The Jetsons had many many “highways” of cars going in every direction. Well, we might not be able to reach the potential yet, but there are developments striving to this goal. […]

Festo’s SmartBird

Earlier in the semester, I wrote my first blog post on “A Robot that Flies like a Bird.” The post was inspired by a video I saw last summer. Within the video, the head of the team Markus Fischer introduced the world to the first ever robot that flies like a bird; or so we […]

Sugar Gliders

Sugar Gliders are quickly becoming one of the most popular pets in the country. In all but four states you can take these furry little flyers home to perform tricks like these for you. But how do they achieve such controlled glides, as seen in the video’s best trick? A sugar glider’s method of aerial […]