A paper published last year in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface described a feather as a masterpiece of engineering, one comprising nine orders of magnitude, from the nanoscale to the meter ...
Research assistant James Whatton confirms the feathers in front of him belong to a gray catbird. Credit: Smithsonian In the hallways of the National Museum of Natural History—past the bathrooms, the ...
An extreme closeup of feathers from a bird with an uncanny ability to hold water while it flies could inspire the next generation of absorbent materials. With high resolution microscopes and 3D ...