Snakes can fly and they don't need a plane to do it. The freaky freaky beasts flatten their bodies and angle their heads so they glide through the air, which make them capable of flying from tree to tree.

Virginia Tech's biomechanist Jake Socha have discovered the mechanism, analyzing video frames and creating a computer model that explains how the glide through the air, saving distances as long as 15 meters. According to Socha:

Our work contributes to this basic understanding of this really unusual way of gliding flight. There's nothing else that does anything close to this — in the engineering world or the biological world.

He probably said that with Samuel L. Jackson's voice. Socha also says that the new glide model could be used for making better, smaller, more efficient flying machines. [The Scientist]