Video: Surreal X-ray movie reveals how a fly beats its wings
This surreal view inside the body of a blowfly is reminiscent of the imagery in the film Alien. Graham Taylor at the University of Oxford and colleagues used X-rays produced by a particle accelerator at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland to peer at the muscles of a live blowfly, in order to study how it beats its wings.
This video, which focuses on the fly's thorax, highlights the muscles that help it fly. The large muscles shown in red, orange and yellow provide the power that keeps the fly aloft, while the much smaller muscles shown in green, blue and cyan are used for steering. Each muscle contracts and relaxes in a single direction, but their collective motion creates a complex beat pattern that moves the fly's wings in three dimensions.
The mechanism may inspire engineers designing tiny mechanical devices. While conventional designs use clockwork, a collection of actuators that each bend and flex in only one direction – just like the fly's muscles – could achieve the same result more efficiently.
Journal reference: PLoS Biology, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001823
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