Kill Every Fly You See
Well…I guess you can wait until further notice, but scientists have been testing micro flying robots. While the story doesn’t say that the use of these robots will be to spy on you, you conspiracy buffs should be happy to know that I am saying it for them. 
The actual story was entitle Micro Flying Robots Can Fly More Effectively Than Flies, but clearly that title is way too descriptive and boring.
They suggest that the flies could be used for spy missions, however, but not the way the paranoid like to think. Also, they say that ithey have the use of search and rescue missions in burning and collapsed buildings. Clearly these people have no idea to what use these will be put to. Tugging on your heartstrings to get funding to watch you pop the best diet pills in your own home. Your life is really interesting I bet and they are watching you if you don’t have on a tin foil hat. These obviously block the signals duh.
Anyways the actual science of all this involves the idea of how they can outfly the fly. According to past studies the development of micro flying spy machines was foudn to take excessive energy if created like a helicopter, or an airplane. They came to the conclusion that modeling such flight after the fly is much more efficient using flapping wings instead.
Now a study performed by Dutch aerospace engineer, David Lentink at Wageningen University (Netherlands), and a leading expert on insect flight, biologist Michael Dickinson at the California Institute of Caltech suggests an even more efficient method.
Together they used a giant robot fly submerged in a tank of oil to test whether flies consume less energy to hover than a micro helicopter outfitted with a fly wing. To their surprise, they found that a spinning fly wing generated the same amount of lift as a flapping fly wing while consuming only half the energy to keep the wing moving. The study shows that robots that hover like flies can save up to 50% energy if they swing an insect wing around like a helicopter blade. This finding can result in new, more energy efficient micro flying robot designs inspired by both the effective wing shape of insects and the energy efficient spinning motion of helicopter blades.
So…even the flying micro-robot (said as robutt if you are really cool) is a hybrid. The helicopter fly wing blade.
Flapping wings waste a lot of energy accelerating the air back and forth,’ explains Lentink. “That is why spinning insect wings consume less energy than flapping wings.” So what does all this mean for engineers keen on designing micro fliers? “Engineers have been thinking that fly sized flying machines would have to fly like a fly to be energy efficient,” says Lentink, but he now realizes that is not the case. The reason being that both spinning and flapping insect wings can generate much more lift than predicted by aerodynamic theory — up to twice as much. The extra lift is generated by a stable ’tornado-like’ vortex that runs parallel to the leading edge of the wing. This vortex lowers the pressure over the wing and sucks it upward, lifting the insect’s weight into the air. It was already known that both spinning and flapping insect wings can generate such a lift boosting vortex.
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Filed under: Science by JMH
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Hi,
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Regards
McCa $ h