Scientists at Seoul National University (SNU) have recently created a robot inspired by tiny blood-sucking bugs: fleas! Pesky as these little insects may be, they’ve got an incredible physical ability that not even an Olympic high-jumper could compete with — these guys can jump over 200 hundred times their own body length! See for yourself in NewScientist’s video above.

Not every insect is capable of such an extraordinary feat, so what is it exactly that puts that special spring in every little flea’s step? The muscle is the flea’s upper-leg is endowed with a special protein called resilin. Nerve impulses stimulate the compression and decompression of the stretchy resilin and in coordination with tissue that acts a bit like a latch, the flea’s jump mechanism operates much the way a spring does.

Using a special alloy called nitinol, derived from nickel and titanium, Minkyun Noh and his team at SNU constructed three tiny springs that function much like the flea’s. Embedded into a tiny 2 cm robot, the insect-inspired machine is able to leap about 30 times its own body length.

Currently, this bot relies on an external power source but scientists are trying to figure out a feasible way to get some nano batteries on board. While applications for the bot have yet to be specified, researchers believe this kind of technology could be used in a wide range of fields— from medicine to environment monitoring.

For more information on the design of this robot, you can access the paper HERE

Last year, Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov, two researchers from the University of Manchester, won the Nobel prize in Physics for their discovery of a new material: Graphene. How did they make this discovery ? They peeled away small flakes of Graphite using sticky tape, resulting in a one atom thick layer of carbon.

Incredibly strong, yet light weight Graphene has many applications; the video above features a flexible touch screen developed by a team at the Graphene Research Lab at Seoul National University and even more recently, Graphene has even been used in Robots! Yi Xie at the University of Science and Technology in China has made a robot partially out of Graphene. The robot is capable of picking up round objects and dropping them in a container.

How does Graphene give the robot its smooth moves? The team put a layer of Graphene on top of their robot’s actuator, enabling it to convert energy into heat at high efficiency through the absorption of infrared light. The team then cut out the layer of Graphene and observed it curling into a cylindrical form.  When they switched the infrared light on again, the strip uncurled. Hence, the strip of Graphene could be controlled by the infrared light.

While Graphene is a fairly new material, it’s far from being remotely explored- according to an article  by the BBC about 200 companies and start-ups are now involved in Graphene research and in 2010, it was the subject of about 3,000 research papers.

Some researchers have claimed that Graphene could replace silicon in many applications however, even Andre Geim thinks that day is very off “The prospect is so far beyond the horizon that we cannot even assess it properly”.  Many experts have expressed that the applications of Graphene and silicon are very different, the main problem with Graphene being that as it doesn’t stop conducting electricity… you can never really turn it off.