Flying Insects and Robots. Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Mandyam V. Srinivasan, and Charlie Elington (Eds.). (2009, Springer.) $119, 328 pages.

Flying insects have attracted a number of scientists for many years, and their contributions to biological sciences should never be underestimated: Research on flying insects has spread out into almost all fields, including sociology, genetics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and the other behavioral sciences. What I have found most fascinating about flying insects is their remarkable intelligence despite their small sizes of body and nervous structures. Flying insects live and survive almost everywhere on the planet; they are capable of wide-ranging behavioral capabilities, including basic behaviors such as takeoff, landing, escaping, chasing, and mating, as well as foraging and learning; and some species can even communicate to form social structures. While human beings exhibit similar behaviors, flying insects achieve these functions by using typically very different mechanisms from those of humans, and they are often very elegant. I don't remember how many times I was surprised by the clever solutions by...