The leaves of the common roadside milkweed plant are poisonous to people and most other creatures. Alongside many other plants, its leaf tissues contain cardenolide poisons as a natural defense.

People instantly recognize intelligent engineering in a structure that has optimized size or shape. Optimum parameters don't just happen. So when two mechanical engineers recently discovered optimum sizing in locust legs, to what did they attribute that high level of engineering?

Data storage technology has come a long way since punch cards. But the undisputed king of data density is still DNA. A team of scientists fit 70 billion copies of their genetics book—including page formatting instructions and images totaling 700 terabytes of data—into just one gram of DNA.

Many jellyfish are transparent, and they have seemingly simple movements and few visible interacting parts. They should, therefore, be easy to synthesize with man-made parts, but that's not what bioengineers discovered when they recently built a jellyfish mimic from rat heart cells attached to a silicone frame.