Modern insects are versatile wing conversationalists. Crickets can scrape a leg against a wing or rub two wings together. Some grasshoppers beat their wings like castanets; others crackle and snap the ...

Although this week's weather has dampened things a bit, this is the time of year when the woodlands get noisy with the sounds of insects. Two of the most obvious groups are the cicadas, which "sing" ...

With a one-of-a-kind museum specimen, researchers recreated the chirp of ancient cricket relatives that droned alongside the dinosaurs. By Jack Tamisiea Whether it’s a cicada’s earsplitting drone, a ...

How did insect wings originate? This is a question that represents an unsolved mystery of insect evolution. Despite many years of research, it is still not entirely clear from which body structure ...

About 350 million years ago, our planet witnessed the evolution of the first flying creatures. They are still around, and some of them continue to annoy us with their buzzing. While scientists have ...

Back in the Midwest, in the summers I listened to cicadas calling and crickets chirping — sounds that don’t happen here in Southeast Alaska. We hear mosquitoes and bees buzzing, of course, but that’s ...

Different insects flap their wings in different manners. Understanding the variations between these modes of flight may help scientists design better and more efficient flying robots in the future.

Matmos has made it their mission to make electro-acoustic music funky and fun. For their new album, Return to Archive, Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt plundered the Smithsonian Folkways library for ...