Shane D. Ross

A lizard falling from a branch doesn't just tumble: it catches the air with its body and turns the fall into a glide. Engineers have long borrowed tricks from such feats, but until now there was no common language to compare the gliding of a snake, a lizard, and a man-made wing. The new study introduces such a language: a three-dimensional map of velocities that shows where any motion inevitably ends up.

The three-body problem is the eternal stumbling block of celestial mechanics. Even Poincaré realized in the late 19th century that its chaos defies general analytical solutions. In this gravitational madness, islands of regularity appear only rarely — periodic orbits.