Soft biohybrid morphing wings with feathers underactuated by wrist and finger motion.

Since the Wright Flyer, engineers have strived to develop flying machines with morphing wings that can control flight as deftly as birds. Birds morph their wing planform parameters simultaneously-including sweep, span, and area-in a way that has proven to be particularly challenging to embody robotically. Previous solutions have primarily centered around the classical aerospace paradigm of controlling every degree of freedom to ensure predictable performance, but underperform compared with birds.

How flight feathers stick together to form a continuous morphing wing.

Variable feather overlap enables birds to morph their wings, unlike aircraft. They accomplish this feat by means of elastic compliance of connective tissue, which passively redistributes the overlapping flight feathers when the skeleton moves to morph the wing planform. Distinctive microstructures form "directional Velcro," such that when adjacent feathers slide apart during extension, thousands of lobate cilia on the underlapping feathers lock probabilistically with hooked rami of overlapping feathers to prevent gaps.

International comparative field study evaluating the assay performance of AFSTYLA in plasma samples at clinical hemostasis laboratories.

Unlabelled: Essentials AFSTYLA exhibits ≈50% underestimation in activity when the one-stage (OS) assay is utilized. A field study compared the performance of AFSTYLA with Advate in factor VIII activity assays. AFSTYLA activity can be monitored with both the chromogenic substrate and the OS assay.

How pigeons couple three-dimensional elbow and wrist motion to morph their wings.

Birds change the shape and area of their wings to an exceptional degree, surpassing insects, bats and aircraft in their ability to morph their wings for a variety of tasks. This morphing is governed by a musculoskeletal system, which couples elbow and wrist motion. Since the discovery of this effect in 1839, the planar 'drawing parallels' mechanism has been used to explain the coupling.