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Despite their vast morphological diversity, many invertebrates have similar larval forms characterized by ciliary bands, innervated arrays of beating cilia that facilitate swimming and feeding. Hydrodynamics suggests that these bands should…
Saving energy and enhancing performance are secular preoccupations shared by both nature and human beings. In animal locomotion, flapping flyers or swimmers rely on the flexibility of their wings or body to passively increase their…
Biological locomotion, observed in the flexible wings of birds and insects, bodies and fins of aquatic mammals and fishes, consists of their ability to morph the wings/fins. The morphing capability holds significance in the abilities of…
In flapping flight, motion of the wings through the air generates the majority of the force and torque that controls the body motion. On the other hand, it is not clear how much effect the body motion imposes on the wings. We investigated…
The motility mechanism of certain rod-shaped bacteria has long been a mystery, since no external appendages are involved in their motion which is known as gliding. However, the physical principles behind gliding motility still remain poorly…
Stretching and retracting wingspan has been widely observed in the flight of birds and bats, and its effects on the aerodynamic performance particularly lift generation are intriguing. The rectangular flat-plate flapping wing with a…
Hovering insects are limited by their physiology and need to rotate their wings at the end of each back and forth motion to keep the wing's leading edge ahead of its trailing edge. The wing rotation at the end of each half-stroke pushes the…
Turbulence is omnipresent in the atmosphere and a long-standing scientific conundrum that makes flight complex. This complexity is little understood; surprisingly, when turbulence arises, air vehicles struggle while birds seem to thrive.…
Like a rocket being propelled into space, evolution has engineered flies to launch into adulthood via multiple stages. Flies develop and deploy two distinct bodies, linked by the transformative process of metamorphosis. The fly larva is a…
Fish gills are one of the most primitive gas/solute exchange organs, having the highest ventilation volume, present in nature. Such performance is attributed to a functional unit of gill - secondary lamella - that can extract oxygen from an…
A growing body of work aims at designing and testing micron-scale synthetic swimmers. One method, inspired by the locomotion of flagellated bacteria, consists of applying a rotating magnetic field to a rigid, helically-shaped, propeller…
Understanding swimming in soft yielding media is challenging due to their complex deformation response to the swimmer's motion. We experimentally show that a scallop-inspired swimmer with reciprocally flapping wings generates locomotion in…
Tail bending associated with maneuvering flight of insects is a known phenomenon although there are only a few studies which analyze and quantify the effects and benefits of body configuration changes. We hypothesized that these…
Oblique collision of solid particles with surfaces has been a topic of extensive study in Newtonian mechanics, which also explains the motion of bubbles and droplets to some extent. Here, we observe that air bubbles exhibit a backflipping…
The stereotypical reaching motion of the octopus arm has drawn growing attention for its efficient control of a highly deformable body. Previous studies suggest that its characteristic bend propagation may share underlying principles with…
Inspired by the natural motion of insects, fish, and other animals, flapping airfoils have gained significant importance due to their applications in fields such as ship propulsion, micro aerial vehicles, and autonomous underwater vehicles.…
Insects excel in trajectory and attitude handling during flight, yet the specific kinematic behaviours they use for maintaining stability in air disturbances are not fully understood. This study investigates the adaptive strategies of…
We study experimentally the dynamics of a water droplet on a tilted and vertically oscillating rigid fibre. As we vary the frequency and amplitude of the oscillations the droplet transitions between different modes: harmonic pumping,…
There is increasing evidence that mammalian cells not only crawl on substrates but can also swim in fluids. To elucidate the mechanisms of the onset of motility of cells in suspension, a model which couples actin and myosin kinetics to…
Over the past few decades, oscillating flexible foils have been used to study the physics of organismal propulsion in different fluid environments. Here we extend this work to a study of flexible foils in a frictional environment. When the…