At the edge of two worlds — one thin with Martian silence, the other buzzing with insect wings — researchers at Tokyo Metropolitan University have found a common question: what shape allows flight when air itself barely cooperates? By turning to evolutionary algorithms and the ancient geometry of insect wings, Professor Masahiro Kanazaki's team has begun to answer it, mapping the precise corrugations and curves that let a wing either slip through near-nothing or push against it with purpose. Their work is narrow by design, but it opens toward something vast — drones that could one day explore