Posts by: David Harris

The Limit of Aerial Evolution

The thought of a Cessna 152 dropping out of the sky from 20,000 ft at 300 mph and pulling out of the plunge five feet off of the ground would scare most pilots to death. But for Argentavis magnificens, it was a lifestyle. Six million years ago, the twenty-three foot wide monster bird would come […]

Gecko-Inspired Rocket Recovery

Geckos exhibit an unusual phenomenon that inspires exciting possibilities in human engineering. While frogs, lizards, and most other organisms that have self-orienting responses while falling use aerodynamics, geckos use principle of conservation of  angular momentum. Professor Robert Full’s lab at UC Berkeley has studied this behavior extensively. In the video from their study, notice how […]