When we think about creatures skimming across water, images of birds landing or frogs leaping come to mind. But some of ...

People’s proud invention of gears was preceded by mindless evolution: The tiny points on the legs of juvenile planthopper insects move like intermeshing cogs. Those cogs in young Issus coleoptratus ...

Gears are ubiquitous in the man-made world, found in items ranging from wristwatches to car engines, but it seems that nature invented them first. A species of plant-hopping insect, Issus coleoptratus ...

Researchers had previously discovered that water striders’ legs work through the chemistry and physics of microprojections lined with nanogrooves on the bugs’ legs (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/432036a).

Right now, there’s a fly walking on the window in my office. I asked my friend Rich Zack how it does that. He’s an insect scientist at Washington State University. It turns out my window isn’t as ...

The image above is an extreme close-up of a common British insect called a planthopper. You’re looking at it from below, at the point where its two hind legs connect to its body. In the middle, you ...

It sounds like a just-so story—“How the Insect Got its Wings”—but it’s really a mystery that has puzzled biologists for over a century. Intriguing and competing theories of insect wing evolution have ...

Adaptability explains why insects spread so widely and why they are the most abundant animal group on earth. Insects exhibit resilient and flexible locomotion, even with drastic changes in their body ...