Not even the best pilot in the world can fly an airplane like the erratic path of an insect, and now scientists know why — bugs are simply exempt from the same laws of aerodynamics that apply to airplanes.
"We've known for quite a while that the aerodynamic theory for airplanes doesn't work so well in predicting the force of lift for flapping wings. We found that the drag or wind resistance also behaves very differently, and we put together a new law that could help explain how insects move through the air," assistant professor at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Leif Ristroph, told Futurity.
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