Why birds speed up to slow down: the physics of landing

University of Manchester

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Key findings

• Birds could theoretically land at zero speed without flapping, but would need much more speed and space.
• Flapping may help birds slow down within the limited space available for landing.
• Swooping may help birds balance a low landing speed with maintaining control.
• The physical demands of landing may have helped shape bird evolution.

Birds may not always take the flight path that physics suggests is the perfect landing, at the safest and lowest possible speed, using the least energy, according to new research.

Most birds flap their wings as they come in to land, despite powered flight requiring more energy than gliding. Now, researchers at The University of Manchester have used mathematical modelling to help explain why.

The study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, found that a bird flying without flapping its wings could, in theory, reach zero speed just as it touches down. However, the manoeuvre would require much higher approach speeds and considerably more space than birds typically use when landing.

For a pigeon-sized bird, the model showed that reaching zero speed would require it to begin at more than twice its typical cruising speed, travel around 60 metres horizontally and climb around 20 metres.

The findings suggest that achieving the lowest possible touchdown speed may not always be practical. Birds may use flapping not simply to slow down, but to do so within the limited space available in a real landing environment.

The research also provides new insight into why some birds swoop when landing on a perch, and how the physical demands of landing may have helped shape bird evolution.

Lead author Dr Ben Parslew, Lecturer in Aerospace Engineering at The University of Manchester, said: “Birds might make landing look effortless but coming to a safe stop presents a fundamental physical challenge. Landing isn’t as simple as just slowing down. The slower a bird flies, the less aerodynamic control it has, so it has to find a way of reducing its speed while still being able to manoeuvre safely. How birds do this and manage these competing demands is still not well understood.

“We used mathematical modelling to calculate how a bird flying without flapping could minimise its speed at touchdown while maintaining the control needed to complete the manoeuvre.

“In doing so, we’ve been able to gain insights into the swooping approaches seen in some perching birds, such as birds of prey, and more broadly, understand how physical demands of landing may have helped shape their evolution.”

Why some birds swoop

The modelling also provides new insight into the swooping behaviours observed in some birds when landing on perches.

Previous research on Harris hawks found that the birds learned to swoop down below their target landing spot before gliding upwards towards a perch. It was proposed that the manoeuvre helped them minimise the distance they travelled after their wings stalled, when aerodynamic control is reduced.

The new modelling suggests that there is more to this behaviour. The landing trajectories appear to reflect a balance between reaching the perch at a low speed and limiting the time spent stalled. The researchers say touchdown speed appears to have a greater influence on the swooping behaviour than previously documented.

Could landing have shaped bird evolution?

Landing on the ground creates a different challenge. Unlike swooping and perching, the bird coming to the ground cannot continue its trajectory below the landing surface or climb upwards through its destination.

The modelling showed that a bird landing on the ground without flapping cannot eliminate all of its speed before its feet touch down. It must therefore use its wings, legs, or a combination of both to deal with the remaining energy.

This places physical demands on the bird's body, requiring more substantial muscles and bones to cope, particularly in the legs. But additional mass can reduce flight performance.

The researchers suggest this trade-off between being light enough for efficient flight and robust enough to land safely could have helped shape the evolution of birds.

The researchers say the same physical principles could also help explain how other flying animals manage unpowered landings.

This research was published in:Proceedings of the Royal Society A

Full title of the paper:Flight dynamics and optimal control of unpowered avian landings

DOI:10.1098/rspa.2026.0103

URL:https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspa/article/482/2348/20260103/483809/Flight-dynamics-and-optimal-control-of-unpowered

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Journal

Proceedings of the Royal Society A Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences

DOI

10.1098/rspa.2026.0103 

 

Could new mathematics help the internet carry more data through existing cables?

Aston University researchers have secured £499,996 from the Leverhulme Trust for a four-year project

Aston University

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Aston University researchers have been awarded almost £500,000 to investigate whether new mathematical techniques could help existing fibre-optic cables carry more data, potentially reducing the need for costly investment in new infrastructure.

The four-year project is being led by Professor Yaroslav Prilepskiy and Professor Sergei Turitsyn from Aston Institute of Photonic Technologies, with £499,996 in funding from the Leverhulme Trust.

Fibre-optic cables carry internet traffic around the world, sending information as pulses of light through thin strands of glass. But as demand for data grows, there is a limit to how much information they can carry.

Increasing the power of the light signals does not automatically mean more data can be sent. Beyond a certain point, stronger signals become distorted and can interfere with other signals travelling through the same cable, making the information harder to receive accurately.

Yaroslav Prylepskiy, research fellow at the Aston Institute of Photonic Technologies, said:

"We tend to think of the internet as something that exists in the cloud, but much of it depends on physical infrastructure that has to work harder as demand grows. Building more capacity is not always simply a matter of laying more fibre. We also need to understand how to make the best possible use of the networks that are already in place. That is one of the reasons this research matters."

One way to increase capacity is to add more wavelengths or install more advanced fibre-optic technology. But both approaches can require significant investment in new equipment or infrastructure.

Scientists already have methods for correcting signal distortion at the receiving end of fibre-optic cables. However, these can require substantial computing power, making them difficult to use in real time on networks carrying large volumes of data.

The researchers want to find out whether a different mathematical approach could help overcome some of these limitations, allowing operators to get more out of the networks they already have.

The project, called Koopman Operator Method for Optical Communications (KOMET-COM), will use a mathematical technique called Koopman operator theory to develop a new way of modelling how light behaves inside fibre-optic cables.

The technique allows researchers to study complicated behaviour in a different mathematical way, making it easier to analyse. Unlike some existing methods, the Aston team wants to build a model that reflects what actually happens to light inside real fibre-optic cables.

Professor Sergei Turitsyn, director of the Aston Institute of Photonic Technologies at Aston University, added:

“One of the problems in high-speed broadband optical communications is that the mathematics describing what happens to light inside a fibre can become extremely complicated. The challenge is to find a way of capturing that behaviour accurately without making the calculations prohibitively demanding. Koopman operator theory gives us a different way of approaching this problem. What we want to establish is whether it can give us a model that is both practical and reliable enough to be useful in real communication systems.”

The researchers will test their approach using computer simulations and experimental data from Aston's optical communications testbed. They will assess how accurately it can model and correct signal distortion under realistic conditions, including signal loss and amplifier noise.

If successful, the research could help engineers correct some of the problems that affect light signals as they travel through cables. This could eventually allow existing fibre-optic networks to carry more data or transmit information over longer distances.

It could also reduce the amount of computing power needed to model how information travels through the networks.

 

Sensors that track stress in plants—without hurting them in the process

Cell Press

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A plant sensor sitting on top of an Aloe vera plant where it can track the plant’s stress levels in real time.

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Credit: Mufeeda Mundummal

Even plants, from towering palm trees to vegetables such as onions and eggplants, can get stressed. Now, a team of engineers has designed a new kind of sensor that attaches directly to plants and peers inside of them to track how they respond to stressors such as drought and fires in real time. Described in a study publishing November 12 in the Cell Press journal Cell Reports Physical Science, the coin-sized device is made up of a sensor and incredibly small needles that poke inside plants without harming plants in the process. The team hopes the device could one day help farmers know when their plants are stressed out.  

“For Saudi Arabia and other arid regions, where agricultural production is strongly influenced by high temperatures and limited water resources, technologies that improve our understanding of plant stress responses could be especially valuable,” says first author Mufeeda Mundummal of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. 

The research hinges on a small but important molecule: hydrogen peroxide. Plants naturally produce small quantities of hydrogen peroxide throughout the day. The molecule sends signals that help plants activate their defenses against pathogens such as fungi and bacteria. 

When plants are exposed to stressful conditions, such as too much heat or light, their cells can produce a surge of hydrogen peroxide. At high doses, the molecule damages plant tissues and may cause other problems. 

Monitoring hydrogen peroxide levels in plants has proved tricky for scientists—at least, without causing damage by collecting pieces from plants. 

“Plants are constantly responding to their surrounding environment, but many of these responses are invisible to us,” says senior author Khaled Salama of KAUST. 

Salama and his colleagues wanted to make the invisible visible. To do that, the team used a laser to create a sensor for hydrogen peroxide made out of graphene. The sensor sits in a device that is about the size of a small coin and rests on top of plant leaves. 

The device’s needles are just 0.4 millimeters wide and can suck up small amounts of fluid from inside leaves. They’re also so tiny that they don’t cause the plants any serious injuries. 

In a series of experiments, the researchers put the sensors to the test. They attached the devices to Aloe vera plants growing in a greenhouse. Then, they shined especially bright lights on some of the plants.  

The succulents got a little stressed out. At normal growing temperatures, or around 19 degrees Celsius (66 degrees Fahrenheit), hydrogen peroxide levels in the plants began to spike almost immediately after the team turned on the bright lights. That surge was even more severe at hotter growing temperatures, or 28 degrees Celsius (82 degrees Fahrenheit). In both cases, the hydrogen peroxide levels declined after about an hour. 

The findings that plants react so much to changes in temperature and light could spell trouble for many important plant species as the planet’s climate changes, and heat waves grow more common, say the authors. 

The team still has work to do before real farmers can use the devices to monitor their plants, including testing their designs on a range of different plant species, but their device could open the door to real-time insights on the inner workings of plants with an unprecedented level of detail. 

“Our research moves plant-health monitoring toward direct measurement of physiological stress signals, rather than relying only on visible symptoms or external environmental conditions,” Mundummal says.  

### 

This work was supported by funding from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and the center of excellence in sustainable food security. 

Cell Reports Physical Science, Mundummal et al., “Wearable laser-scribed graphene-integrated microneedle sensor for continuous in planta oxidative stress monitoring” https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/S2666-3864(26)00536-9

Cell Reports Physical Science (@CellRepPhysSci), published by Cell Press, is a broad-scope, open access journal that publishes cutting-edge research across the spectrum of the physical sciences, including chemistry, physics, materials science, energy science, engineering, and related interdisciplinary work. Visit: https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/home. To receive Cell Press media alerts, please contact press@cell.com. 

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Journal

Cell Reports Physical Science

DOI

10.1016/j.xcrp.2026.103630

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Wearable Laser Scribed Graphene Integrated Microneedle Sensor for Continuous in Planta Oxidative Stress Monitoring

Article Publication Date

12-Nov-2026

 

Researchers discover how the COVID virus triggers sneezing and coughing

Coronavirus proteins directly activate sensory neurons that mediate sneezing, coughing and pain

University of California - Berkeley

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Mice that contract COVID sneeze, cough and experience aches and pains just like humans. UC Berkeley experiments with mice are teasing out how the virus triggers these symptoms. 

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Credit: Sonali S. Mali

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as Diana Bautista and others in her UC Berkeley lab suffered sneezing and coughing fits and achy bodies, she recognized an interesting scientific question: How, exactly, do viruses cause the noxious symptoms we’re all familiar with from bouts with colds, the flu and COVID?

Five years later — and after a detour to prove to scientific reviewers that her experimental subjects, mice, do sneeze — she has the beginnings of an answer. She now devotes more than half of her energy and lab staff to investigating the wiles of coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2 and how they interact with the nervous system and the immune system to give us a headache — literally.

In the Nov. 13 issue of the journal Neuron, she and her colleagues report that SARS-CoV-2 proteins stimulate sensory nerves directly, triggering sneezing, coughing and pain. The prevailing view was that these symptoms come from inflammatory mediators released by infected epithelial and immune cells acting on sensory neurons. This study shows there is another route by which viruses trigger sneezing, coughing and respiratory dysfunction.

This is the first evidence that viral proteins can directly activate sensory nerves to promote viral symptoms, and could lead to therapeutic interventions. This direct activation may also help explain some of the chronic conditions associated with long COVID, including headache, shortness of breath, persistent cough, sore throat and chest pain.

The specific viral protein that triggers the sensory nerves is a known protease called PLpro, for papain-like protease. It and another protease, called Mpro (main protease), are produced in cells infected with the virus, and cuts the long viral polyproteins into the individual proteins crucial to replication. After the virus kills these cells, the contents — including the viral proteases — are released into the body and stimulate a subset of sensory nerves called nociceptors, which are found throughout the airways and are particularly sensitive to noxious stimulants.

While the drug Paxlovid targets Mpro and alleviates some symptoms of COVID-19, targeting PLpro might also have benefits. Since the pandemic began, numerous drugs targeting PLpro have been developed, though none were approved for COVID.

“We think that these protease inhibitors that people spent a lot of time and money developing could be important not just for preventing viral replication,” said Bautista, a Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “They could also help treat symptoms like coughing, which could limit viral spread, and potentially prevent severe COVID-19 in individuals who are susceptible.”

The researchers also found that Mpro directly triggers sensory neurons, though it triggers different reactions than does PLpro. They’re finding that other viruses, like the influenza virus, trigger symptoms in still other ways.

“There are many modes by which viral and bacterial infections can act in our bodies — there are distinct molecular and cellular routes of triggering this type of airway hyper-reactivity,” she said. “With so many emerging pathogens, we’re just starting to understand how they work. So far, it looks like they can drive symptoms through both the immune system and the nervous system, using different molecular mechanisms. I think we have a lot to figure out.”

That raises the question: Are symptoms like coughing and sneezing primarily protecting the host by expelling the virus, or are they helping the virus reach more people?

“Who is it helping?” she said. “Maybe it's a little bit of both in the end. If it's early enough, then it's beneficial to get out as much of that virus as possible before it can infect other cells. So it’s good having these symptoms early on to sneeze out mucus containing the virus.”

Do mice sneeze?

Bautista specializes in studying the sensory neurons involved in touch, itch and pain, and in earlier work identified the specific receptor, called TRPA1, that responds to chemicals in wasabi and garlic. She has also conducted research on how chemicals affect the trigeminal nerves that innervate the face — nerves that can get inflamed and become painful during a COVID infection.

In a sense, research on how coronaviruses interact with sensory nerves was a natural extension of this earlier work. In the current paper, Bautista and her colleagues show that PLpro reacts with something on the surface of sensory neurons to activate the TRPA1 ion channel — the same channel activated by wasabi and garlic — to trigger pain, sneezing, cough and airway inflammation. TRPA1 essentially causes the release of neuropeptides that go on to trigger reflexes and other physiological consequences.

To demonstrate the role of PLpro, she and her team purified the protein and showed that the protein alone was sufficient to activate cultured sensory neurons. When the enzymatic activity of the protease was eliminated through inactivation of the protein’s catalytic site, it had no effect on sensory neurons.

The researchers then dabbed the noses of mice with 2 microliters of purified PLpro. While water alone might trigger a single sneeze, PLpro triggered up to 30 sneezes per minute.

Despite audio and video recordings of mice sneezing, some reviewers of the paper were not convinced that mice do, in fact, sneeze. So she purchased a $75,000 plethysmograph to measure the lung spasms that accompany the sneeze, which turned out to be similar to those in other sneezing animals, like guinea pigs. Her team even dyed the liquid containing PLpro blue so that they could see the expelled snot and measure the amount in each sneeze.

They also discovered that PLpro triggered mechanical hypersensitivity and pain, suggesting that direct activation of sensory nerves might be a mechanism that triggers the aches and pains associated with viral infection.

PLpro from two other varieties of coronavirus, SARS-CoV-1 and MERS, also triggered sensory neurons.

While the new paper answers some questions about how viruses interact with the nervous system — until now, an open question in biology — her lab has much more work to do.

“This opened up lots of areas of research. If just two viral proteins can have such a dramatic consequence on the nervous system, what else are viruses and other viral proteins doing? What happens when the neurons themselves get infected, which we know can happen? How are the neurons contributing to the antiviral response? There are many questions.”

“I guess that's why so many people in my lab want to work on this, because, from a biological standpoint, it's just fascinating. How did we not think about this before?” she said.

The work was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health (OD TR01 NS116992) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Co-authors of the paper are Sonali Mali, Ricardo Silva, Zhongyan Gong, Michael Cronce, Uyen Vo, Cliff Vuong and Jeffery Cox of UC Berkeley and Yalda Moayedi of the New York University College of Dentistry. Bautista is a member of Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute.

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Journal

Neuron

DOI

10.1016/j.neuron.2026.10.017

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

A coronavirus protease activates sensory neurons via TRPA1 to drive sneeze, cough, and pain

Article Publication Date

12-Nov-2026

Mice that contract COVID sneeze, cough and experience aches and pains just like humans. UC Berkeley experiments with mice are teasing out how the virus triggers these symptoms.

Credit

Sonali S. Mali

Steinacher’s new book examines Vatican’s fight against Nuremberg Trials

The Nuremberg Trials were meant to open a new chapter in international justice. Inside the Vatican, however, church leaders pursued a different agenda.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

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Gerald Steinacher (center) explains the meaning of laid bricks at the Holocaust Memorial in Wyuka Cemetery in Lincoln, Nebraska.

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Credit: Craig Chandler/University Communication and Marketing

The Nuremberg Trials, held after World War II, were meant to open a new chapter in international justice. Inside the Vatican, however, church leaders pursued a different agenda.

In his new book, “The Pope Against Nuremberg: How the Vatican Helped Nazis Escape Postwar Justice,” University of Nebraska–Lincoln historian Gerald J. Steinacher explores the Vatican's response to the Allied countries' prosecution of Nazi war criminals. The monograph was published in early November by NYU Press.

Although historians have written a great deal about the Nuremberg Trials, the Vatican’s stance and reaction to war crimes trials and denazification have so far received very little attention. The recent opening of the Vatican archives (formerly known as the Vatican Secret Archives) for the pontificate of Pius XII now offers a view behind the Vatican walls.

Drawing on those Church records as well as on intelligence files and other sources from more than 60 archives in Europe and the Americas, Steinacher, James A. Rawley Professor of History, reveals how Catholic officials tried to shield Nazi perpetrators from prosecution. Papal diplomats and individual bishops wrote petitions to Allied leaders, worked closely and tirelessly with the defense, organized press campaigns against the trials and opposed extraditions. Some clergy even hid Nazi and fascist war criminals on church premises.

Pius XII, frequently faulted for his public silence about the Holocaust, was vocal after 1945 when it came to speaking up for Nazi perpetrators. The Vatican criticized the trials from the start, and its opposition only grew as the war crimes trials and denazification went on. In the end, it called for a generous amnesty and asked the world to forgive and forget Germany’s crimes and to help rebuild the country. In the book, Steinacher sets these efforts against the backdrop of the early Cold War, when fear of communism increasingly mattered more than holding the perpetrators of mass crimes to account. 

The book is the result of 10 years of research. Historian and Pulitzer Prize winner David I. Kertzer, author of “The Pope at War,” called it “a true tour de force.”

Eighty years after the Nuremberg verdicts, the book speaks to a question that remains urgent today: how can societies move on after dictatorship, war and genocide?

“World War II and the Holocaust left behind immense suffering, and there was no simple way forward,” Steinacher said. “The Allies chose punishment. War crimes trials and denazification were meant to break with the Nazi past and to show people what crimes the regime had committed. Nuremberg was as much a classroom as a courtroom. Not every perpetrator could be tried, and Allied crimes never came before the court. But simply forgetting and pardoning ignored the victims. For many of them, justice was done at Nuremberg, even if it was imperfect.”

Nuremberg was also meant to look ahead. The American architects of Nuremberg hoped to set new standards of international law that would deter future dictators from dragging their countries into another war.

“Instead of a jungle where the strongest rule, the Americans behind Nuremberg envisioned an international order grounded in the rule of law,” Steinacher said. “It was not a perfect project, but its standards were meant to apply to everyone in the future, victors as well as vanquished. The lesson from Nuremberg is clear: the international order must rest on the rule of law, with no one above it. Even the most powerful heads of state and military leaders must be held accountable for their crimes.”

A presentation in Lincoln is planned for later this year, and a book tour across the United States and Europe will follow in early 2027. A scholar of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy, Steinacher has published 18 authored or edited books and more than one hundred articles and book chapters. His book, “Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice” (Oxford University Press, 2011) received the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category. He is also the author of “Humanitarians at War: The Red Cross in the Shadow of the Holocaust” (Oxford University Press, 2017). Steinacher has held numerous fellowships and visiting professorships, including at Harvard University, in Jerusalem, Venice, Munich and Vienna, and at the Australian National University. His research has been featured in The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and Der Spiegel.

 

Study links cement particle shape and construction costs

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, News Bureau

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In the lab, the team rapidly captures hundreds of photomicrographs of cement grains, then runs them through computer image processing to measure particle size and shape. 

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Credit: Photo by Fred Zwicky

Engineers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a low-cost test that could help the construction industry save money. The new technique uses a $500 microscope-based framework to measure cement particle size and shape — both critical to cement and concrete quality — at a fraction of the cost of currently used laser diffraction equipment, which costs roughly $50,000 or more.  

Unlike conventional laser-based equipment, which measures only cement particle size, the alternative microscope-based approach can also assess particle shape. Shape matters because it can affect how cement behaves when mixed with water. Rough, angular particles may make a mixture stickier and harder to pour and work with, while rounder particles can flow more easily.

The method, developed by civil and environmental engineering professor Nishant Garg and U. of I.  graduate students Tausif Elahi and Bayezid Baten, defines a new metric the team calls SSM, short for “size and shape metric,” that assigns a value to the size, shape and fineness of cement particles. A higher SSM number indicates a population of particles associated with greater resistance to flow.

The study findings are published in the journal Powder Technology, along with an open-access dataset of approximately 7,200 images. This work builds on Garg’s previous studies that improved testing efficiency for cementitious materials, including a five-minute ultra-rapid reactivity test as well as an automated droplet test for durability.

“Concrete is the most used material on Earth just behind water,” Garg said. “It starts off as a slurry that workers must pour and spread on site. If that slurry is sticky and difficult to work with, it can slow down a project, adding a significant cost and time burden.”

In the lab, the team suspends cement powders in a nonreactive liquid and uses a sonication device to break up the powder agglomeration, ensuring a homogeneous suspension. They then drop the liquid onto a glass slide and, once dried, capture hundreds of photomicrographs, which they run through computer-image processing to measure particle size and shape across the images.

“The resulting SSM data can be plotted against a property called yield stress, which is essentially how much stress is needed to make a material flow,” Garg said. “We also envision using SSM to provide a quantitative basis to measure other properties of cement such as hydration kinetics, strength development and flow resistance to establish a unified connection between what we see under the microscope and how that relates to macroscopic, real-world behavior.”

The team reports that the new process still involves considerable manual work and does not account for the cement’s chemical makeup. In future work, they aim to automate the process and potentially combine it with chemical analysis techniques. Longer term, the researchers hope to develop affordable and automated testing devices for wider industrial use.

 “We want to accelerate and automate,” Garg said. “In summary, we think we can bring this tech to the market by creating an automated system that will incorporate the microscope, imaging and processing that may ultimately cost a fraction of conventional laser diffraction-based instruments.”

Garg’s group has been developing accelerated and automated testing methods for cement and concrete-based materials over the past few years. One of their patent-pending methods, their five-minute ultra-rapid reactivity test, can predict the performance of supplementary cementitious materials within a few minutes as opposed to several days to weeks with conventional methods. This test is currently being commercialized by the startup Rapid Analytix Division, or RAD, that is spinning out of Garg’s lab.

The Grainger Engineering Graduate Fellowship and the Illinois Distinguished Fellowship supported this study.

Editor’s note:   

To reach Nishant Garg, email garg-group@illinois.edu. The paper “Size and shape metric (SSM): An image-based descriptor for linking particle morphology to performance of cementitious powders via low-cost microscopy” is available online. DOI: 10.1016/j.powtec.2026.123350. Civil and environmental engineering is part of The Grainger College of Engineering.

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Journal

Powder Technology

DOI

10.1016/j.powtec.2026.123350

Method of Research

Imaging analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Size and shape metric (SSM): An image-based descriptor for linking particle morphology to performance of cementitious powders via low-cost microscopy

Article Publication Date

12-Nov-2026