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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The small hopping insect Issus coleoptratus uses toothed gears (magnified above with an electron microscope) to precisely synchronize the kicks of its hind legs as it jumps forward. All images ...

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 ...

There are about 40 kinds of cats out there – like me. There’s only one kind of human on Earth now. But there are more than a million kinds of insects. That’s just the insect species we know about.