This article was written for the September 5, 2023 edition of Tech News, WPI’s campus newspaper. If you’ve ever seen falconry videos online, you know how agile birds can be. Watching them fly at top speed through gaps between trees and through obstacles until they reach their goal is something truly remarkable. Currently, there is a lab on campus dedicated to pushing the limits of autonomous control by attempting to fly a drone with the same speed and agility as these naturally engineered creatures (proving that birds are real, at least for now).

This article was written for the September 13, 2022 issue of Tech News, WPI’s campus newspaper. On August 31 of this year, WPI grad student Heather Leclerc et al. published a paper detailing an improved way to produce biofuel. Biofuel is made by taking some kind of biomass, typically algae or food waste, extracting the oil content, and separating it into different grades of fuel. There are several ways to do this, including chemical reactions and fermentation, but the particular method Leclerc et al.