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 ...

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 ...

High-speed cameras have captured in vivid detail how springtails flip themselves into the air, showing that they spin faster than any animal ever recorded. Springtails, a type of arthropod in a group ...

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 ...

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 in ...