Hummingbirds can hover so well they seem to float in mid-air. With the help of a supercomputer, Vanderbilt University mechanical engineer Haoxiang Luo has fleshed out some of the secrets of how hummingbirds hover, flight that's more similar to that of an insect than the typical bird. Luo and his colleagues published their results June 2014 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. They hope this research can be used to help develop both micro and unmanned aerial vehicles. Luo performed computer simulations of the three-dimensional flow patterns that swirl around a hummingbird's wings using the Lonestar supercomputer of the Texas Advanced Computing Center. The Lonestar system is part of the National Science Foundation's Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), a single virtual system that scientists use to interactively share computing resources, data and expertise. To read further, please visit https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/feature-stories/2014/hummingbird-hovers-for-supercomputer .