Insects dominate this world. More than 70 percent of the described species on Earth are insects. What made them so successful? Their wing, says Yoshi Tomoyasu, associate professor of biology at Miami ...

In 1870, a German anatomist named Karl Gegenbaur was the first person to theorize that abdominal gills on water insects like mayflies eventually developed into wings. For the next 150 years, ...

Modern insects are versatile wing conversationalists. Crickets can scrape a leg against a wing or rub two wings together. Some grasshoppers beat their wings like castanets; others crackle and snap the ...

A closer look at seemingly drab, transparent insect wings has revealed realms of previously unappreciated color, visible to the naked eye yet overlooked for centuries. Until now, the wing colors of ...

The first mutation of the wingless gene was found by accident in Drosophila in the 1970s, following the observation of flies that did not possess wings, hence its name. Fifteen years after its ...

Biological structures sometimes have unique features that engineers would like to copy. For example, many types of insect wings shed water, kill microbes, reflect light in unusual ways and are ...