Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast.

Each episode, we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

Robots can surpass the limitations on how high and far animals can jump, but their success

only underscores nature's ingenuity in making

the most of what's available.

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Explore math mysteries in the Quanta book, The Prime Number Conspiracy, published by the MIT

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find this podcast. One day in the summer of 2021, when Chris Keely was an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he stood atop the coastal cliffs near campus.

He crouched to pull a bundle of metal and rubber out of his backpack. It was a robot,

which he spent several minutes winding up. When he was done, he hit record on his phone's camera

and watched the robot launch itself high into the air, draw an arc in the sky. It's going to land

right where it took off. And land neatly near his feet.

Keely was relieved. Many previous test jumps had failed. Later that night, Keely returned to his

bedroom and downloaded the jump data onto his laptop. That's when he realized just how well it had

worked. The jumper had reached a record-breaking height of about 32.9 meters. Kille and his

collaborators, led by Elliot Hawks, a mechanical engineering researcher at the University of California,

Santa Barbara, reported the jump last April in nature. Not only had the robot jumped more than

...