Coming to a theater near you!!

Actually, it's more like... 
Coming to a laboratory near you.

Yep, they're moths... They're giant... They're robots... And... They're REAL! Scientists hope to use them for secret surveillance in enemy territory! Pretty cool, huh?

Built by a research scientist named Charles Ellington, this "thing" is called Flapper. It's got a wing span of 40 inches (that's more than a yard and about a meter) and they are using it to study how insects fly.

Scientists used to think that insect wings worked the same way an airplanes wings work... 

Airplane wings are more curved on the top than on the bottom. As a wing slices through air, the air above has further to go to reach the back of the wing (because of the big curve) and moves faster than the air below the wings.

Air that moves quickly has less pressure than air that moves slowly. That means there is less pressure on the top of the wing than below it. Less pressure on top means that the wing moves up! Check it out:

But they found out that insect wings don't work like this at all!

How'd they figure this out? They stuck one of the little buggers in a wind tunnel (this is where they blow a bunch of wind with big fans at something and watch what happens) and shot smoke at it while it flew. It turns out that insects don't have enough of this airplane wing kind of lift to fly, so they kept investigating...

But, there was one problem: Bugs wings flap way too fast to see what's going on! They're really really small too!

So Charles built Flapper. It took 9 months and cost about $60,000. Like we said, it's giant and he can control the speed of the flapping to better see what's going on. Flapper takes about 3 seconds to do one wing beat.

Ok, back to the experiment... Flapper starts flapping while they have a bunch of smoke around him. (The smoke is so they can see the air swirling around!) Do you know what happened? Little tornados of smoke formed on the surface of Flapper's wings - one on the left and one on the right! These little tornados are called vortices. They now think that is how insects fly... They are still investigating though.