How do birds' tails work? Delta–wing theory fails to predict tail shape during flight

How do birds' tails work? Delta-wing theory fails to predict tail shape during flight.

Birds appear to use their tails during flight, but until recently the aerodynamic role that tails fulfil was largely unknown. In recent years delta-wing theory, devised to predict the aerodynamics of high-performance aircraft, has been applied to the tails of birds and has been successful in providing a model for the aerodynamics of a bird's tail. This theory now provides the conventional expla...

Birds do not work harder to breathe.

An efficient one-way airflow system is essential for bird flight. Extracting more oxygen per breath than mammals, birds can meet the costly fuel demands of flight. However, despite the gains achieved by maximising the amount of oxygen passing through their lungs, the metabolic cost of breathing for birds could be high. Birds were thought to have to work against the weight of their flight muscle...

How Do Birds Sing?

Cortical magnification theory fails to predict visual recognition.

The sense of form is poor in indirect view. Yet the cortical magnification theory asserts that the disadvantage can be made up by scaling the image size according to the spatial variation in the mapping of the retina onto the cortex. It is thus assumed that all visual information passes through a functionally homogeneous neural circuitry, with the spatial sampling of input signals varying acros...

The Tail at Scale: How to Predict It?

Scale-out applications have emerged as the dominant Internet services today. A request in a scale-out workload generally involves task partitioning and merging with barrier synchronization, making it difficult to predict the request tail latency to meet stringent tail Service Level Objectives (SLOs). In this paper, we find that the request tail latency can be faithfully predicted, in the high l...