A tiny garden bug has been dubbed the real-life Sonic the Hedgehog because it does the fastest backflips on the planet. The "insanely fast" globular springtail completes a full body rotation in less ...

Springtails, small bugs often found crawling through leaf litter and garden soil, are expert jumpers. Inspired by these hopping hexapods, roboticists have made a walking, jumping robot that pushes the ...

Springtails are about the size of a pinhead, but they can control their jumps like seasoned acrobats. By Oliver Whang Among the wonders of the natural world that few people have ever noticed: a ...

Editor’s note: This story was updated Nov. 9, 2022. Springtails look chaotic to the untrained eye. Whether on a balmy pond or melting snow, the miniscule creatures are, true to their name, constantly ...

Using a combination of computational and robophysical modeling, as well as fluid dynamics experiments, the researchers were able to see for the first time the mechanics of springtail movement. They ...

A tiny arthropod beats out all other creatures for the world’s fastest backflip. The minuscule globular springtail has a flip rate of 368 per second. They jump so fast they seem to vanish in front of ...

You may have been impressed by the gymnastics on display in Paris this summer, but a common backyard bug can top anything on display at the Porte de La Chapelle Arena. At least, that's according to a ...

Using high-speed photography, researchers led by Víctor Ortega-Jiménez at the Georgia Institute of Technology have solved the mystery of how springtails jump away from danger and successfully land on ...