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 ...

Early in the pandemic, Víctor Ortega-Jiménez was exploring creeks near his home and observing springtails. The organisms are the most abundant non-insect hexapods on earth, and Ortega-Jiménez ...

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 ...

It’s not just panic and chance. Some of nature’s extreme self-launchers, the springtails, turn out to be much more acrobatic than scientists thought. Springtails, poppy seed–sized cousins of insects, ...

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 ...

Move over, Simone Biles. Nature’s gold medalist for backflips is a millimeter-tall arthropod that can barely straddle the tip of a pencil. “Nothing on Earth does a backflip faster than a globular ...

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 ...

This winter has brought plenty of cold weather and snow, but the recent warm spell gives hope that spring is coming. Warming weather also brings out one of the most common land insects in our area, ...

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 ...

Springtails look chaotic to the untrained eye. Whether on a balmy pond or melting snow, the miniscule creatures are, true to their name, constantly springing up from the surface in a cloud of ...