Biolocomotion
Living organisms navigate space in a fascinating variety of ways, most of which require exquisite control. We look at locomotor behavior across a wide range of scales, from the flight of individual insects to the collective motion of people.
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Dynamics, Control, and Stabilization of Turning Flight in Fruit Flies
Collective Motion of Humans in Mosh and Circle Pits at Heavy Metal Concerts
Active and passive stabilization of body pitch in insect flight
Cohen lab interview on Physics Buzz
At March Meeting 2012, Calla Cofield of APS Physics Centeral and host of the Physics Buzz Podcast interviewed Cohen Group member Jesse Silverberg about his research on the helical buckling of plant roots. Click here for the interview.
Physics of Mosh Pits on CBC's As It Happens
On Feb 14, 2013, co-author Jesse Silverberg was intereviewed on CBC's radio program, As It Happens. You can download and listen to the podcast here.
Collective Motion in Mosh Pits
Flocks of birds and schools of fish are two common examples of collective motion. Though herding behavior in animals is well recognized, humans exhibit their own set of emergent phenomena. For example, pedestrians walking down the sidewalk form lanes, and stadium crowds perform "The Wave".
Tsevi Beatus and Itai Cohen measure 5 millisecond reflex in fruit flies
Postdoctoral fellow Tsevi Beatus, working with Itai Cohen, associate professor of physics, and John Guckenheimer, professor of mathematics, have discovered that flies stabilize themselves during flight using a control reflex that’s among the fastest in the animal kingdom.
Read more in the Chronicle.
The full article is in Royal Society Interface.
Hovering fruit fly
Untitled from Cohen Group on Vimeo.
Shown is a video of the types of insect flight movies we capture with our fast video camera and the fidelity with which our Hull Reconstruction Motion Tracking method is able to extract the wing and body motions of the insects.
Mosquito flight
This video explains why we are interested in studying mosquitoes.
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