Flying Lemurs with Wiis? Not exactly, but close.

Many of the reports in the news this week about scientists strapping Nintendo Wii controllers on the backs of flying lemurs have several details wrong, but the story is basically true. While colugos are not actually lemurs, can't actually fly, and aren't getting real Wiis to play with, two scientists are using accelerometers (like those in Wii remotes) and memory chips (similar to the ones in iPods) to study how the colugos are able to control their glides and thus land gracefully on nearby branches rather than plummeting straight to earth like you or I might do. Andrew Spence, now at the Royal Veterinary College in England, and Greg Byrnes, a graduate student in UC Berkeley's Department of Integrative Biology, made backpack-like attachments that could be temporarily glued onto the animals' backs, and then retrieved after recording flight data. Spence, as quoted on Environmental Graffiti, explained why the backpacks were important: "Despite being common throughout their natural range, the Malayan colugo is quite poorly understood because it’s hard to measure things about an animal that moves around at night, lives 30 metres up a tree, and can glide 100 metres away from you in an arbitrary direction in 10 seconds. Our new sensing backpacks have given us an insight into the behaviour of these fascinating creatures.” Some of the results of the study can be found on Scientific Blogging, and may be used by human aeronautical engineers to improve our machine-assisted flights.