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DOD tries to uncover secret of flying snakes

WASHINGTON POST (DC) 23 November 10 Pentagon seeks flying snakes' secret (Marc Kaufman)
An unusual breed of Asian snakes can glide long distances in the air, and the Defense Department is funding research at Virginia Tech to find out why.
Most animals that glide do so with fixed wings or a winglike part. But not the "flying snakes" of Southeast Asia, India and southern China - at least five members of the genus Chrysopelea.
As video of the reptiles show, they undulate from side to side, in almost an air-slithering, to create an aerodynamic system. It allows them to travel from the top of the biggest trees in the region (almost 200 feet high) to a spot about 780 feet away from the tree's trunk.
"Basically . . . they become one long wing," said John Socha, the Virginia Tech researcher who has traveled extensively in Asia to study the snakes and to film them.
"The snake is very active in the air, and you can kind of envision it as having multiple segments that become multiple wings," he said. "The leading edge becomes the trailer, and then the trailer become the leading edge."
It gets stranger. During a technique not yet understood, some of the snakes can actually turn in air. What's more, they all take a flying leap off their perch to get airborne, then drop for a while to pick up speed before starting the motion that keeps them aloft much longer than they would otherwise.
Socha's initial research was sponsored by the National Geographic Society, but his most recent work and paper were funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The agency is involved in advanced military technologies of all kinds, and Socha said the physical dynamics of snake flight (and how other creatures stay in the air) is of great interest to the agency.
DARPA did not respond to an e-mail asking for more information. But Socha's upcoming paper on the dynamics of gliding snakes in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics does list DARPA as its financial sponsor.
Socha was a featured speaker Monday at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Physics.
The snakes, Socha said, spend most of their lives in the trees. They are between two and three feet long and about as wide as a finger. The larger snakes, he said, generally cannot glide as far as the smaller ones.
The snakes are mildly venomous, he said, but "won't hurt a human, though they can be fatal to a gecko."
While the prospect of a flying snake seems strange today, current scientific theory says that birds evolved from dinosaurs, which were reptiles.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/22/AR2010112207014.html

POPULAR SCIENCE (New York, New York) 23 November 10 Serpent Science: DARPA Wants to Know Flying Snakes' Secret (Clay Dillow)
From ancient dragon mythology to the lesser offerings from Samuel L. Jackson’s body of work, mankind has long shown an apprehension toward – one might even say a phobia of – airborne snakes. Perhaps it’s the ability of these flying reptiles to strike fear into even the steeliest of human hearts that has the Pentagon interested in just exactly how these snakes perform their aerial acrobatics.
The snakes – which hail from Southeast Asia and India mostly and are of the Chrysopelea genus – are the subject of intense study by Virginia Tech researcher John Socha, but for a biologist he has an interesting backer in DARPA, the DoD’s blue-sky research arm. DARPA naturally is tight-lipped about its interest in flying snakes, but its dollars are helping Socha create 3-D reconstructions of the biology and physics involved, research that is being published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biometrics.
How do the snakes do it? The don’t really fly, per se, but rather fall with purpose. The snakes climb to the tops of the tallest trees, some 200 feet in the air, and then take a leap. But their method for turning their elongated forms into aerodynamic vehicles is pretty amazing, allowing them to travel nearly 800 feet laterally as they descend. They do this by first falling to pick up speed, then by initiating a strange aerial dance that essentially turns their bodies into one long wing. Some of them can actually pull off a turn in the air.
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-11/serpent-science-darpa-wants-know-flying-snakes-secret