Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Snowy conditions and cold weather could reveal springtails, ancient arthropods typically found on snow piles during the winter.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...