Most birds fly. To aid flight, avian bones are hollow, reducing their mass. In addition, bird wings and feathers are optimally designed for flight.
So why can't large birds or mammals fly? One of the problems is that they are too heavy to lift off the ground, necessitating unrealistically large wings to make it happen. However, it seems as if someone might have figured out how to design human wings for flight:
An analysis of whether or not this popular video is potentially real or fake is presented in a post from Rhett Allain, an Associate Professor of Physics at Southeastern Louisiana University, in Wired Science that you can access here.
More like this
A very interesting new paper was published today in PLoS Biology:
I'm stuck in the US East Coast ice and snow trying to get home after some science work for our nation's health agency (that is my rationale for posting this on my Sb blog). My four-hour equipment and weather delay has now turned into a canceled flight.
I thought many of you would want to know about this book. It is from the National Academies Press. Costs 40 bucks if you want the dead tree version, but the PDF is free. Gotta love the National Academies.
Here's the description provided by the NAP:
tags: researchblogging.org, flight speed, bird
If this isn't fakey, those wings have got to be filled with hydrogen/helium.
This is a little late. The video was released back in mid-March.
On 21 March, Gizmodo reported a thorough debunking by professional CGI experts.
Shortly thereafter (22 March) the artist who created the video admitted it was a hoax.
I vaguely recall reading a while back that someone actually went to the trouble of comparing weight of comparable size bird and mammal bones. They found no significant difference in weight, as I recall.