Octopus

Australia has one of the longest coastlines in the world. And it's packed with life of all shapes and sizes—from lively dolphins leaping offshore, to tiny crabs scurrying into their holes.

Natural camouflage is one of nature's most interesting traits. Materials scientists have now developed a material that can mimic the camouflage capabilities of marine mollusks. They created a starfish-shaped soft robot that responds to heat and pressure with deformation, movement, and color changes. Cut-off tentacles can be welded together, and the material can be fully recycled, they write in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

The two-meter skull of a newly discovered species of giant ichthyosaur, the earliest known, is shedding new light on the marine reptiles' rapid growth into behemoths of the Dinosaurian oceans, and helping us better understand the journey of modern cetaceans (whales and dolphins) to becoming the largest animals to ever inhabit the Earth.

For generations, scientists have relied on a handful of organisms to study the fundamentals of biology. The usual suspects—fruit flies, zebrafish, and mice, among others—all have short lifespans, small body size, can be bred through multiple generations in the laboratory, and have been developed for genetic investigations. These research organisms leave out a whole swath of biological diversity and scientists have lacked access to a cultured octopus laboratory organism—until now. […]

Does a lobster feel pain when you pop it in a pot? The UK government asked us to find out.