Dario Floreano

Jul 31, 2024 | nature.com | Hoang-Vu Phan |Dario Floreano

AbstractBirds, bats and many insects can tuck their wings against their bodies when at rest and deploy them to power flight. Whereas birds and bats use well-developed pectoral and wing muscles1,2, how insects control their wing deployment and retraction remains unclear because this varies among insect species. Beetles (Coleoptera) display one of the most complex mechanisms.

Feb 12, 2024 | thereader.mitpress.mit.edu | Erika Nesvold |Dario Floreano |Nicola Nosengo |Wade Roush

BeeLine Reader uses subtle color gradients to help you read more efficiently. Exploration, habitation, and resource extraction all carry a risk of inflicting environmental damage in space, just as they do here on Earth. But some futurists and space settlement enthusiasts have proposed an even more drastic alteration of the space environment: the transformation of the surface of a planet or moon into a more Earth-like environment via a process known as terraforming.

Dec 30, 2023 | biorxiv.org | Dario Floreano |Hoang-Vu Phan

AbstractBanked turn is a common flight manoeuvre observed in birds and aircraft. To initiate the turn, whereas traditional aircraft rely on the wing ailerons, most birds use a variety of asymmetric wing morphing control techniques, validated in engineered replicas, to roll their bodies and thus redirect the lift vector to the direction of the turn.

Dec 1, 2023 | thereader.mitpress.mit.edu | Prosanta Chakrabarty |Dario Floreano |Nicola Nosengo |Jeffrey McKinnon

BeeLine Reader uses subtle color gradients to help you read more efficiently. Glance around any social event and it’s obvious that people, like all living things, vary in most any trait one can see or measure. And with our newfound ability to sequence entire genomes from thousands of species, we are learning that even more variation is hidden in our DNA. Working out how all this variation persists has been one of the great challenges of evolutionary biology.

May 6, 2023 | inverse.com | Dario Floreano |Nicola Nosengo

In the early 2010s, a new trend in robotics began to emerge. Engineers started creating robotic versions of salamanders, dragonflies, octopuses, geckos, and clams — an ecosystem of biomimicry so diverse the Economist portrayed it as “Zoobotics.” And yet Italian biologist-turned-engineer Barbara Mazzolai raised eyebrows when she proposed looking beyond animals and building a robot inspired by a totally different biological kingdom: plants.