Looking to nature to improve on engineering, UC Berkeley researchers have cleared a major design hurdle in their quest to build a tiny robotic fly that the Defense Department hopes to use as a spy. The robot, called "microfly," remains a long way from buzzing around a room, but the recent creation of minuscule wings that flap like their biological counterparts marks a breakthrough in understanding how insects fly, scientists said. Microfly is at the vanguard of a field known as biomimetics, based on the idea that biological systems are more flexible and adaptable than anything coming out of...
