Scientists Study Amazing Flight of Flies
May 1 -- The ordinary fruit fly can change the direction of its flight by 90 degrees in about 50-thousandths of a second, a feat that has long puzzled scientists and bedazzled engineers who, it turns out now, were mistaken in their understanding of how Drosophila melanogaster performs that magical maneuver.
Until now, it had been thought that the fly uses air friction generated by its flapping wings to change its direction at an astonishing rate of 2000 degrees per second.
But new research shows the animal is far more sophisticated than that. It uses torque to rotate its body in the direction it wants to go and then flaps its wings furiously to speed off in the new direction.
The maneuver is analogous to a hovering helicopter that rotates from north to west, and then zips westward. Tiny critters weren't supposed to be able to do that.
"But the fly has to do this whole little ballet in about one-fifth the blink of a human eye, and the only way it's capable of doing that is with some rather spiffy neuro-circuitry," says Michael Dickinson, professor of bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Dickinson's lab, equipped with sophisticated video equipment, has caught the fly in the act, and the images show its intricate maneuvers in great detail, according to research published recently in the journal Science.
Dickinson is a leader in the field of insect flight, and his motivation for the research is pretty basic.
"Figuring out how the world works is motivation enough," he says.
Toward Tiny Flying Spies
But there's more to it than that. Scientists are increasingly looking at the world of plants and animals to solve some of our most pressing problems, and the lowly fly could play a critical role in that effort.
Dickinson is working with physicists and engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, to develop tiny robots that could fly through the air like a fly, and perform some task that might be too dangerous for humans.
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