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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...