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.

Imagine a cloth that gets stronger after it is damaged. That is what scientists recently discovered when probing the strength of garden spider webs.

The diamond weevil, which makes its home in the Brazilian tropics, has a body studded with tiny, brilliant reflectors. Each one is like a diamond, reflecting different-colored light in shiny arrays. New research has probed the microstructure of these brilliant facets and discovered that the way they work is familiar—but the way they are made is not.

Scuba divers can explore underwater depths firsthand because of specialized equipment that was developed in just the last century. Likewise, solar-powered airplanes currently in development promise to provide fuel-free flying. These inventions open new realms for human exploration, but the arachnid and insect equivalents of their equipment have been on the planet for ages.

Human eyes are well-designed to see objects using light transmitted through air, but not through water, because light travels at a different speed through the two media. However, intertidal-dwelling marine mollusks called chitons can see equally well in both environments. How did they acquire this unusual ability?