MIT Engineers Develop Robot That Flies and Swims Like a Puffin

At the edge where sky meets sea, MIT engineers have achieved what nature took millennia to refine — a bird-scale robot that flies, dives, swims, and returns to flight, guided by the quiet wisdom of the puffin. The breakthrough is not merely mechanical; it is a lesson in humility, a reminder that evolution has already solved problems we are only beginning to ask. By reverse-engineering the puffin's improbable grace across two mediums, the team has opened a door to machines that inhabit the margins of the world — coastlines, wetlands, flooded places — where the most urgent questions about our pl