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Hello and welcome to the American Burning podcast from the American Burning Association.

I'm Nate Swick.

The traditional news media has been falling all over itself in the last week with regard to weird flying objects over the Great

Lakes that apparently require military plane intervention to destroy. The objects have been

described as balloons, as UFOs in the traditional sense of not knowing what they are rather than the Hollywood

extraterrestrial sense. Not that you'd know it from a lot of the discourse. One was described

as an octagonal structure with strings attached. I have no compelling insight into this real news

item. This is not a real news item podcast. But, you know, that part of the Great Lakes is a hot spot

for birds of prey migration. And a rough-legged hot could maybe be described as an octagonal

structure, at least very loosely octagonal. I was drawn recently to a news item from last year,

though, that fits the overlap between birds and aerial vehicles. You like that segue.

A bit more explicitly.

A group of researchers from Penn State and elsewhere, we're using hummingbirds as a model

for small aerial robots.

And in doing so, came to some insight into hummingbird flight as a result, which is kind of

cool.

Hummingbirds famously have a somewhat

unique musculoskeletal system that drives that famous flight. They don't just move their wings in a

relatively simple back and forth motion, but pull their wings in three directions up and down,

...