Scientists taught a spider how to jump so they can one day do the same for robots

We know spiders best as quiet, eight-legged monsters who lurk around and trap their prey with webs and venom. Terrifying as it is, the way these spiders jump is worth studying. They can leap six times the distance of their body length from a standing start (humans can only manage a paltry 1.5 times their own length), and carry five times their weight into the air. Translating these physiological wonders into engineering strategies could revolutionize the type of robots we build and deploy--though hopefully not ones that lunge at human prey. A team of researchers from the University of Manchester in the UK ran a study that trained a regal jumping spider (Phidippus regius) named Kim to jump across various distances of a platformed obstacle course, all while ultra-high-speed videos took footage of the leaps.