Flying bats do not travel through silence. Every call they make comes back layered with sound from leaves, branches, trunks, and open gaps. In a real woodland corridor, those echoes arrive together, ...

For the past 25 years, Professor of Engineering and Biology Sharon Swartz and Professor of Engineering Kenneth Breuer ’82 P’14 P’16 have been fascinated by animal flight. The two professors have ...

Sound plays an important role for many animals, helping them navigate and hunt. Echolocation is the ability of animals like bats and dolphins to locate objects by emitting sound waves and interpreting ...

Hair-thin muscles embedded in the skin of their wings allow bats like this Jamaican fruit bat to change the stiffness and curvature of their wings at different points of the wing stroke. That ...

Bats are not only masters of aerodynamic flight — they’re skillful at multitasking while flying, too. By Rachel Nuwer Some humans like to think of themselves as good multitaskers, but bats may do it ...

Nocturnal bats use cues from the sunset to calibrate their magnetic compasses for night-time navigation. The sun makes more sense than other stars, if only because it is closer (and thus bigger). I ...