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Mosquito on elder plant image credit: Pixabay / zsuzstot |
Nature magazine recently published a fascinating article on high frequency mosquito flight. The authors of this comprehensive article discuss mosquito wing beats with “three axes and angles that define flapping wing kinematics [describing the motion of points]; stroke position, wing pitch angle, and deviation angle.”To read the article in its entirety, click on "High Frequency Mosquito Flight Shows Design". In addition, there's another with some fascinating aerodynamic information, and how mosquito flight is being studied for biomimetics, "Science Says Mosquitoes Cannot Fly But Recently Found Out How They Do".
In the past, zoologists (i.e., aerodynamicists) have used a procedure to monitor wing movement called quasi-steady modelling. However, for the mosquito, this approach could not “encapsulate wake capture, rotational drag and nonlinear vortex phenomena.” But the four researchers were successful in describing the “unusual wing kinematics” of the mosquito.
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