Enlarge / Gentoo penguins are the world’s fastest swimming birds, thanks to the unique shape and structure of their wings.Priya Venkatesh/CC BY-SA 3.0
Gentoo penguins are the world’s fastest swimming birds, clocking in at maximum underwater speeds of up to 36 km/h (about 22 mph). That’s because their wings have evolved into flippers ideal for moving through water (albeit pretty much useless for flying in the air). Physicists have now used computational modeling of the hydrodynamics of penguin wings to glean additional insight into the forces and flows that those wings create underwater. They concluded that the penguin’s ability to
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