Robotics

New designs for jumping and wing-flapping microrobots

Researchers at the University of California (UC) Berkeley have recently designed two insect-scale microbots, one that jumps and another that flaps its artificial wings. These robot designs, presented in two papers pre-published ...

Engineering

Engineers study hovering bats and hummingbirds in Costa Rica

Each sunrise in Las Cruces, Costa Rica, River Ingersoll's field team trekked into the jungle to put the finishing touches on nearly invisible nets. A graduate student in the lab of David Lentink, assistant professor of mechanical ...

Robotics

A robot to track and film flying insects

Flying insects have developed effective strategies for navigating in natural environments. However, the experimental study of these strategies remains challenging due to the small size of insects and their high speed of motion: ...

Engineering

Sounds of mosquito mating rituals could lead to quieter drones

Mosquitoes flap their wings not just to stay aloft but for two other critical purposes: to generate sound and to point that buzz in the direction of a potential mate, researchers at Johns Hopkins University have discovered.

Hi Tech & Innovation

What do dragonflies teach us about missile defense?

Be grateful you're not on a dragonfly's diet. You might be a fruit fly or maybe a mosquito, but it really wouldn't matter the moment you look back and see four powerful wings pounding through the air after you. You fly for ...

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Fruit

The term fruit has different meanings dependent on context, and the term is not synonymous in food preparation and biology. Fruits are the means by which flowering plants disseminate seeds, and the presence of seeds indicates that a structure is most likely a fruit, though not all seeds come from fruits.

No single terminology really fits the enormous variety that is found among plant fruits. The term 'false fruit' (pseudocarp, accessory fruit) is sometimes applied to a fruit like the fig (a multiple-accessory fruit; see below) or to a plant structure that resembles a fruit but is not derived from a flower or flowers. Some gymnosperms, such as yew, have fleshy arils that resemble fruits and some junipers have berry-like, fleshy cones. The term "fruit" has also been inaccurately applied to the seed-containing female cones of many conifers.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA