A jumping insect has gears, scientists have discovered, a rare instance in which man and nature independently converged on the same idea.
It was not easy to verify. One species of plant hopper is tiny, just a bit larger than a flea. And it jumps extremely fast — with an acceleration of 200 Gs, a level close to the highest ever survived by a human.
But neurobiologist Malcolm Burrows and engineer Gregory Sutton, both of the University of Cambridge, used a high-speed camera attached to a microscope to capture the bugs in action. They put their tiny subjects on their backs on sticky wax and gently rubbed their bellies to provoke them to jump.