About 350 million years ago, dragonflies were roughly 27 inches (70 centimeters) wide. Scientific consensus is that high oxygen levels allowed these humongous fliers to exist, but a new study throws that idea into question.
In 1995, a Nature paper introduced a hypothesis that a period of high atmospheric oxygen was what allowed insects to grow so huge. That remained the consensus for a good 30 years, until—incidentally, also in Nature—an international team of researchers uncovered strong evidence that the flight muscles of insects are not constrained by atmospheric oxygen levels. The latest paper, published yesterday, potentially overturns this “textbook” theory on giant ancient insects—meaning that insect gigantism now returns to the basket of unsolved mysteries about ancient creatures.
If the new study is valid, there is “no physiological reason why insects the size of griffinflies could not fly in today’s atmosphere,” the researchers wrote in a column about the work for The Conversation. “And yet they don’t exist today.”
The giant bug-o-sphere
According to the new paper, it’s a “broadly accepted paradigm that oxygen enabled the evolution of complex life.” That led researchers to consider whether levels of oxygen in the atmosphere, which has changed throughout Earth’s history, would effectively “constrain” the evolution of body size for different species.
Throughout the 20th century, researchers discovered multiple fossils of giant insects with incomprehensibly wide wingspans. One of these was the griffinfly, which was later found to have lived in a time when Earth’s atmospheric oxygen levels were 9% higher than that today.
At the time, it made a lot of sense to assume that the two variables—the griffinfly’s size and higher oxygen levels—were connected, since the giant bugs “required these high external oxygen levels to power the rapid burn of energy during flight,” the team wrote in its column. Staying airborne requires that the flier defy gravity, so to speak, and the “rate of oxygen consumption increases roughly in proportion to the weight of the flier,” the researchers added.
Untapped flight potential
But the team wondered if insects could self-supply that oxygen demand, given how they have a unique biological, tree-like mechanism called the tracheal system. This structure delivers oxygen to insect flight muscles via a network of air-filled tubes called tracheoles, the development for which previous research confirmed was “heritable” and “highly plastic,” the paper noted.
The team arrived at this hypothesis during a separate investigation on the flight muscles of locusts, which revealed that tracheoles took up a measly 1% of the muscle fibers. The researchers then measured 44 species of flying insects across different sizes, taking 1,320 microscopic photos over five years.
Their results showed that this strangely low investment in tracheoles was quite common in flying insects. For context, a different organ with similar functions in birds and mammals occupies “about ten times the relative space,” Roger Seymour, the study’s senior author and a biologist at Adelaide University in Australia, said in a statement.
“This shows there is plenty of scope to increase the number and volume of tracheoles without weakening the muscle,” the team wrote in the column. “The conclusion is that the body size of flying insects has never been limited by the structure or function of their tracheal systems.”
Reopening a closed case?
If the findings are confirmed, this means that, theoretically speaking, there’s no reason that the griffinfly “could not survive in today’s atmosphere,” the team wrote. Given the physiological potential of flying insects, the ginormous flappers could simply compensate for lower atmospheric oxygen by growing more tracheoles.
But the team adds in the statement that the theory of oxygen constraining insect size isn’t “dead yet,” as it’s still possible that other physiological factors could be limited by oxygen levels. However, the findings strongly suggest researchers should “look elsewhere for why these giants existed,” according to the statement.
“The simpler reasons may be that larger animal species are more prone to extinction than smaller ones,” the team wrote. “300 million years ago, the griffinfly had no bird or mammal predators to watch out for.”
The griffinfly and its extra-large contemporaries may be long gone, but their legacy continues to uncover some fascinating insights into the versatility of insect biology.
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![IBM Crosses One of Computing’s Biggest Barriers With World’s First Sub-1 Nanometer Chip
In a major breakthrough, IBM revealed the world’s first semiconductor chip technology built on a sub-1 nanometer chipmaking process. For comparison, the process uses transistor features smaller than the width of a DNA strand, which measures about 2.5 nanometers across. The chip itself is about the size of a fingernail but holds almost 100 billion transistors, and the company expects it could enter markets as early as the next five years. In a statement released today, IBM said the new chip features nearly twice the density of its 2-nanometer chip, released in 2021. According to an accompanying technical report, the chip also demonstrated up to 70% greater energy efficiency than its predecessor. In designing the chip, researchers developed an “entirely new transistor architecture” called nanostack, which “vertically stacks and staggers transistors” to enable IBM’s 0.7-nanometer chip technology, IBM explained. A section of the chip seen with a transmission electron microscope. Credit: IBM “With our new nanostack architecture, we’re not just making smaller transistors,” Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research, said in the statement. “We’re reinventing how chips are built to deliver dramatically more power and energy efficiency.”
Smaller and smaller Semiconductor chips enable things like computers, home appliances, communications, and transportation devices. In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore surmised that transistor capacities evolved at a predictable and consistent rate. Specifically, all things considered, the number of transistors on a semiconductor chip would double about every two years. For a while, the so-called Moore’s Law held rather well—until, that is, things hit a literal wall.
“Moore’s Law was never meant to last forever,” according to a blog post by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. “Transistors can only get so small and, eventually, the more permanent laws of physics get in the way.” That is, as companies try to cram more transistors into smaller chips, new advances in transistor technology take longer than two years, so Moore’s Law has been over since at least 2016, Charles Leiserson, a computer scientist at MIT, said in the blog. Accordingly, the issue now is to consider how improvements in chip performance fit into a longer-term picture, Willy Shih, an economist at Harvard Business School, said in an explainer.
Reaching atomic levels In that sense, IBM’s latest chip represents an inventive approach for bypassing the limits of physical scaling. Specifically, two wafers with nanosheet-style transistors are glued together like a sandwich to vertically stack two layers of transistors, and related technical assessments suggested that the wafer stacking was flexible and scalable enough to support real computation, Huiming Bu, vice president of IBM’s silicon technology research team, said in a press briefing on the chip. Researcher holding IBM’s sub-1 nm node wafer. Credit: IBM That said, this chip isn’t quite ready for manufacturing just yet. The company’s goal is to enter production in the next five years, but there’s still work to be done. For instance, Bu pointed out that the team was still working on pathways to prevent thermal noise or integration into existing systems in the high-performance computing community. “From my perspective, I hope to see it be as successful as the 2-nanometer [chip] and become the industry platform,” Gambetta said during the briefing. “And as we see with AI and classical computing in general, we are only seeing more and more consumption.” #IBM #Crosses #Computings #Biggest #Barriers #Worlds #Sub1 #Nanometer #ChipIBM,Semiconductors,transistors](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/06/nanostacking-ibm-sub-nm-chip-1280x720.jpg "IBM Crosses One of Computing’s Biggest Barriers With World’s First Sub-1 Nanometer Chip
In a major breakthrough, IBM revealed the world’s first semiconductor chip technology built on a sub-1 nanometer chipmaking process. For comparison, the process uses transistor features smaller than the width of a DNA strand, which measures about 2.5 nanometers across. The chip itself is about the size of a fingernail but holds almost 100 billion transistors, and the company expects it could enter markets as early as the next five years. In a statement released today, IBM said the new chip features nearly twice the density of its 2-nanometer chip, released in 2021. According to an accompanying technical report, the chip also demonstrated up to 70% greater energy efficiency than its predecessor. In designing the chip, researchers developed an “entirely new transistor architecture” called nanostack, which “vertically stacks and staggers transistors” to enable IBM’s 0.7-nanometer chip technology, IBM explained. A section of the chip seen with a transmission electron microscope. Credit: IBM “With our new nanostack architecture, we’re not just making smaller transistors,” Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research, said in the statement. “We’re reinventing how chips are built to deliver dramatically more power and energy efficiency.”
Smaller and smaller Semiconductor chips enable things like computers, home appliances, communications, and transportation devices. In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore surmised that transistor capacities evolved at a predictable and consistent rate. Specifically, all things considered, the number of transistors on a semiconductor chip would double about every two years. For a while, the so-called Moore’s Law held rather well—until, that is, things hit a literal wall.
“Moore’s Law was never meant to last forever,” according to a blog post by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. “Transistors can only get so small and, eventually, the more permanent laws of physics get in the way.” That is, as companies try to cram more transistors into smaller chips, new advances in transistor technology take longer than two years, so Moore’s Law has been over since at least 2016, Charles Leiserson, a computer scientist at MIT, said in the blog. Accordingly, the issue now is to consider how improvements in chip performance fit into a longer-term picture, Willy Shih, an economist at Harvard Business School, said in an explainer.
Reaching atomic levels In that sense, IBM’s latest chip represents an inventive approach for bypassing the limits of physical scaling. Specifically, two wafers with nanosheet-style transistors are glued together like a sandwich to vertically stack two layers of transistors, and related technical assessments suggested that the wafer stacking was flexible and scalable enough to support real computation, Huiming Bu, vice president of IBM’s silicon technology research team, said in a press briefing on the chip. Researcher holding IBM’s sub-1 nm node wafer. Credit: IBM That said, this chip isn’t quite ready for manufacturing just yet. The company’s goal is to enter production in the next five years, but there’s still work to be done. For instance, Bu pointed out that the team was still working on pathways to prevent thermal noise or integration into existing systems in the high-performance computing community. “From my perspective, I hope to see it be as successful as the 2-nanometer [chip] and become the industry platform,” Gambetta said during the briefing. “And as we see with AI and classical computing in general, we are only seeing more and more consumption.” #IBM #Crosses #Computings #Biggest #Barriers #Worlds #Sub1 #Nanometer #ChipIBM,Semiconductors,transistors")
![IBM Crosses One of Computing’s Biggest Barriers With World’s First Sub-1 Nanometer Chip
In a major breakthrough, IBM revealed the world’s first semiconductor chip technology built on a sub-1 nanometer chipmaking process. For comparison, the process uses transistor features smaller than the width of a DNA strand, which measures about 2.5 nanometers across. The chip itself is about the size of a fingernail but holds almost 100 billion transistors, and the company expects it could enter markets as early as the next five years. In a statement released today, IBM said the new chip features nearly twice the density of its 2-nanometer chip, released in 2021. According to an accompanying technical report, the chip also demonstrated up to 70% greater energy efficiency than its predecessor. In designing the chip, researchers developed an “entirely new transistor architecture” called nanostack, which “vertically stacks and staggers transistors” to enable IBM’s 0.7-nanometer chip technology, IBM explained. A section of the chip seen with a transmission electron microscope. Credit: IBM “With our new nanostack architecture, we’re not just making smaller transistors,” Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research, said in the statement. “We’re reinventing how chips are built to deliver dramatically more power and energy efficiency.”
Smaller and smaller Semiconductor chips enable things like computers, home appliances, communications, and transportation devices. In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore surmised that transistor capacities evolved at a predictable and consistent rate. Specifically, all things considered, the number of transistors on a semiconductor chip would double about every two years. For a while, the so-called Moore’s Law held rather well—until, that is, things hit a literal wall.
“Moore’s Law was never meant to last forever,” according to a blog post by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. “Transistors can only get so small and, eventually, the more permanent laws of physics get in the way.” That is, as companies try to cram more transistors into smaller chips, new advances in transistor technology take longer than two years, so Moore’s Law has been over since at least 2016, Charles Leiserson, a computer scientist at MIT, said in the blog. Accordingly, the issue now is to consider how improvements in chip performance fit into a longer-term picture, Willy Shih, an economist at Harvard Business School, said in an explainer.
Reaching atomic levels In that sense, IBM’s latest chip represents an inventive approach for bypassing the limits of physical scaling. Specifically, two wafers with nanosheet-style transistors are glued together like a sandwich to vertically stack two layers of transistors, and related technical assessments suggested that the wafer stacking was flexible and scalable enough to support real computation, Huiming Bu, vice president of IBM’s silicon technology research team, said in a press briefing on the chip. Researcher holding IBM’s sub-1 nm node wafer. Credit: IBM That said, this chip isn’t quite ready for manufacturing just yet. The company’s goal is to enter production in the next five years, but there’s still work to be done. For instance, Bu pointed out that the team was still working on pathways to prevent thermal noise or integration into existing systems in the high-performance computing community. “From my perspective, I hope to see it be as successful as the 2-nanometer [chip] and become the industry platform,” Gambetta said during the briefing. “And as we see with AI and classical computing in general, we are only seeing more and more consumption.” #IBM #Crosses #Computings #Biggest #Barriers #Worlds #Sub1 #Nanometer #ChipIBM,Semiconductors,transistors](https://i1.wp.com/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/06/nanostacking-ibm-sub-nm-chip-1280x720.jpg?ssl=1 "IBM Crosses One of Computing’s Biggest Barriers With World’s First Sub-1 Nanometer Chip
In a major breakthrough, IBM revealed the world’s first semiconductor chip technology built on a sub-1 nanometer chipmaking process. For comparison, the process uses transistor features smaller than the width of a DNA strand, which measures about 2.5 nanometers across. The chip itself is about the size of a fingernail but holds almost 100 billion transistors, and the company expects it could enter markets as early as the next five years. In a statement released today, IBM said the new chip features nearly twice the density of its 2-nanometer chip, released in 2021. According to an accompanying technical report, the chip also demonstrated up to 70% greater energy efficiency than its predecessor. In designing the chip, researchers developed an “entirely new transistor architecture” called nanostack, which “vertically stacks and staggers transistors” to enable IBM’s 0.7-nanometer chip technology, IBM explained. A section of the chip seen with a transmission electron microscope. Credit: IBM “With our new nanostack architecture, we’re not just making smaller transistors,” Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research, said in the statement. “We’re reinventing how chips are built to deliver dramatically more power and energy efficiency.”
Smaller and smaller Semiconductor chips enable things like computers, home appliances, communications, and transportation devices. In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore surmised that transistor capacities evolved at a predictable and consistent rate. Specifically, all things considered, the number of transistors on a semiconductor chip would double about every two years. For a while, the so-called Moore’s Law held rather well—until, that is, things hit a literal wall.
“Moore’s Law was never meant to last forever,” according to a blog post by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. “Transistors can only get so small and, eventually, the more permanent laws of physics get in the way.” That is, as companies try to cram more transistors into smaller chips, new advances in transistor technology take longer than two years, so Moore’s Law has been over since at least 2016, Charles Leiserson, a computer scientist at MIT, said in the blog. Accordingly, the issue now is to consider how improvements in chip performance fit into a longer-term picture, Willy Shih, an economist at Harvard Business School, said in an explainer.
Reaching atomic levels In that sense, IBM’s latest chip represents an inventive approach for bypassing the limits of physical scaling. Specifically, two wafers with nanosheet-style transistors are glued together like a sandwich to vertically stack two layers of transistors, and related technical assessments suggested that the wafer stacking was flexible and scalable enough to support real computation, Huiming Bu, vice president of IBM’s silicon technology research team, said in a press briefing on the chip. Researcher holding IBM’s sub-1 nm node wafer. Credit: IBM That said, this chip isn’t quite ready for manufacturing just yet. The company’s goal is to enter production in the next five years, but there’s still work to be done. For instance, Bu pointed out that the team was still working on pathways to prevent thermal noise or integration into existing systems in the high-performance computing community. “From my perspective, I hope to see it be as successful as the 2-nanometer [chip] and become the industry platform,” Gambetta said during the briefing. “And as we see with AI and classical computing in general, we are only seeing more and more consumption.” #IBM #Crosses #Computings #Biggest #Barriers #Worlds #Sub1 #Nanometer #ChipIBM,Semiconductors,transistors")
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