Brave bird wears goggles and flies through a laser for science

To the brave bird willing to wear goggles and fly through a laser sheet: we salute you. Thanks to you, we know a little more about how you and your kind fly.
When birds lift off, their wings generate tiny, circular currents of air called wingtip vortices. Think of them like tiny tornadoes under the wings. The movement of the vortices can tell us a lot about how flapping wings help birds fly, but we weren’t able to measure the currents until now. In a study published today in the journal Bi