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 ...

In the intricate world of insects, few creatures capture the imagination quite like the flatid planthopper waxy nymph. These tiny, sap-sucking insects are more than just delicate figures that look ...

Planthoppers are champion jumpers — launching themselves upward, hundreds of times their own height, in just a couple of milliseconds. They... Living Gears Help This Bug Jump Greg Sutton was closely ...

Gears may seem like a purely human invention. And yet the basic interlocking mechanism found inside grandfather clocks and car steering systems has now turned up in the remarkably powerful legs of ...

Igor Siwanowicz's image of planthopper nymph gears won 9th place in the Olympus BioScapes International Digital Imaging Competition. Photo courtesy of Igor Siwanowicz, HHMI Janelia Research Campus, ...

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 ...

A garden variety bug found in backyards around the world has been hiding a surprising secret in plain sight, a set of natural gears essential to its prodigious jumping ability. Without the gear wheels ...

PULLMAN, Wash. -- Scientists at Washington State University and China Jiliang University have discovered that the quality of the host rice plant determines whether the brown planthopper, a major pest ...

Plants are challenged by a myriad of herbivorous insect attacks in their natural habitat. As a result, plants show various constitutive and induced defenses, protecting themselves from herbivore ...

What you are seeing in this picture is a magnified image of the rear legs of a common planthopper insect. And those teeth you see, called trochanter bumps, are the only-known example of gears that ...

LOS ANGELES — Gears may seem like a purely human invention. Yet the basic interlocking mechanism found inside grandfather clocks and car-steering systems has turned up in the remarkably powerful legs ...