CAnMove 2nd conference

During two days members of CAnMove have attanded the 2nd conference, whith invited talks given by various canmovians, including PhD-students, postdocs, seniors and two members of the Scientific Advisory Board. Marilyn Ramenofsky talked about her work on physiological adaptations to the annual cycles, using two populations the white-crowned sparrow, while Steven Reppert gave an overview about his lab's work monarch butterfly migration (see picture). The Animal Flight lab was well represented and gave two presentations (Christoffer and Anders). During the conference we also discussed how to further improve the activities within CAnMove, and how to facilitate even better research. It was a great meeting and now we just have to dig into it and move forward!

New Publication from Oxford Group

In a new paper published in Science last week the Oxford group of animal flight, headed by Adrian Thomas, shows how important it is for a locust to have appropriate camber and wing twist to maintain the high performance achieved by insect wings. The way they do it is by using a CFD (computational Fluid Dynamics) model, and in a stepwise manner remove the camber and twist exhibited by the real locust. Before trusting the model output, the CFD model was validated against real data using smoke flow visualization and PIV measurements obtained from locusts tethered in the wind tunnel. In accompanying podcast Adrian explain certain problems they had in modeling the upstroke of the hind wings, so go an listen also for that.