October 22, 2011 at 12:41 am
When you look up in the sky you just may happen to see a group of birds flying in a V formation. But have you ever wondered why they do this? Its not because the “Mighty Ducks” told them to stick together or because it is just a random coincidence, it actually has a purpose. […]
October 21, 2011 at 7:36 pm
Thousands of years ago, early hunters discovered that a single bend in a piece of wood gave it some interesting aerodynamics properties. Tossed vertically, a boomerang will fly in a loop, returning to its thrower. How is such a seemingly simple object able to move through the air so remarkably? When we examine the boomerang […]
October 21, 2011 at 7:33 pm
One of my favorite things about spring and summer is lying in an open field watching the clouds go by. Every once and a while a plane will go by leaving an enormous wake of what looks like white clouds behind it. Only recently did I learn that these cloud trails are caused by vortexes of […]
October 21, 2011 at 6:24 pm
When we are young, we classify everything into very black and white catagories. What is a bird? Orginally, our response was a tiny flying animal with feathers and wings. However, that description is astronomically incorrect. Birds do not have to be small. The largest flying bird, the Argentavis, (extinct as of 2009) has a wingspan […]
October 21, 2011 at 5:31 pm
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 […]