You may not know what a springtail is but man, those little things can jump! Scientists have now copied the creatures' jumping mechanism in a small robot that could one day explore places that people ...

Globular springtails (Dicyrtomina minuta) are small bugs about five millimetres long that can be seen crawling through leaf litter and garden soil. While they do not have wings and cannot fly, they ...

The next time you’re near a pond or creek, bend down and take a closer look—you just might see tiny insect-like organisms, not much bigger than the width of a spaghetti strand, taking incredible leaps ...

Springtails, small bugs often found crawling through leaf litter and garden soil, are expert jumpers. Inspired by these hopping hexapods, roboticists in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of ...

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 ...

Move over, Sonic. There’s a new spin-jumping champion in town – the globular springtail (Dicyrtomina minuta). This diminutive hexapod backflips into the air, spinning to over 60 times its body height ...

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 ...