Think You Can Design a Better Fruit Fly?

What happens when you tinker with the design specs of a live flyer? Four European scientists with specialties in biology and aerodynamics got together and ran some clever experiments with fruit flies to find out. The biologists found ways to change the shape of the flies' wings, and the flight engineers measured what happened in performance tests. Their findings, published in Nature Communications, yield some lessons about the capabilities of mutation and natural selection to make modificati...