Manta rays are elegantly shaped. They swim by flapping their fins like enormous wings, and their gills filter for plankton with the utmost precision. These creatures have now inspired human innovations that take soft robots and water filters to the next level.

With fins that borrow their shape and motion from mantas, a soft robot created by a team of researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of Virginia improves on a previous model by reaching speeds of 6.8 body lengths per second, nearly double what its predecessor was capable of. This makes it the fastest soft robot so far. It is also more energy-efficient than its previous iteration and can swim not just on the surface, but upward and downward, just like an actual manta ray.

Another research team at MIT used the gills of these creatures, which filter for plankton, to improve commercial water filtration systems. Their gill openings are also the perfect size to help them breathe while they feed, absorbing oxygen from water on its way out. The rays’ balance of feeding and breathing helped the researchers figure out a filter structure that more precisely controls inflow and outflow.

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Behold the frogfish. This bizarre creature really is a fish, despite its bullfrog face, pectoral fins that look like webbed feet, and a froglike mouth that snaps up unsuspecting prey.

But the way it lures its prey is even weirder. Frogfish belong to the anglerfish family known as Antennariidae. Like their anglerfish cousins who lurk in the ocean’s depths, these ambush predators attract their next meal via an appendage on their heads that they use like a fishing lure. This appendage is known as the illicium and thought to have once been a dorsal fin. It has a specialized skin flap, the esca at the end. It tantalizes small fish and crustaceans into thinking it’s a worm until they come too close.

How frogfish controlled the illicium was previously unknown. Led by biologist Naoyuki Yamamoto of Nagoya University, a team of researchers have now discovered that a specialized population of motor neurons have evolved to allow it to shake the illicium around like a wriggling worm. Yamamoto thinks they were originally dorsal fin motor neurons that became more specialized.

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Whether it’s braving the long line at a trendy new restaurant or hanging on just a few minutes longer to see if there’s a post-credits scene after a movie, the decision to persevere or ditch it depends on specific regions of our brains.

Waiting is not always about self-control. Deciding to wait (or not to wait) also involves gauging the value of the potential reward. In an experiment that investigated wait times among people with lesions in the frontal cortex of the brain, University of Pennsylvania psychologist Joe Kable and his research team found that subjects with damage to certain regions of the prefrontal cortex were less likely to wait things out.

“[Our] findings suggest that regions of the frontal cortex make computationally distinct contributions to adaptive persistence,” he and his team said in a study recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

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There is now a genetic excuse not to bother cutting carbs. Humans have genetically adapted to eating starchy foods, and our ancestors may have been carb-ivores even before modern Homo sapiens emerged.

The salivary amylase gene, known as AMY1, is already known to have helped us adapt to eating carbs. It encodes amylase, an enzyme that breaks starches found in pasta and bread down to glucose—and may have given us a taste preference for them. Humans have multiple copies of the gene, which may help us produce high levels of the enzyme.

Researchers from the University of Buffalo and the Jackson Laboratory have now found that, while most copies of this gene arose with the advent of farming, modern humans and our closest relatives had accumulated extra copies long before agriculture.

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Lizards are ancient creatures. They were around before the dinosaurs and persisted long after dinosaurs went extinct. We’ve now found they are 35 million years older than we thought they were.

Cryptovaranoides microlanius was a tiny lizard that skittered around what is now southern England during the late Triassic, around 205 million years ago. It likely snapped up insects in its razor teeth (its name means “hidden lizard, small butcher”). But it wasn’t always considered a lizard. Previously, a group of researchers who studied the first fossil of the creature, or holotype, concluded that it was an archosaur, part of a group that includes the extinct dinosaurs and pterosaurs along with extant crocodilians and birds.

Now, another research team from the University of Bristol has analyzed that fossil and determined that Cryptovaranoides is not an archosaur but a lepidosaur, part of a larger order of reptiles that includes squamates, the reptile group that encompasses modern snakes and lizards. It is now also the oldest known squamate.

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Some of the most bizarre lifeforms on Earth lurk in the deeper realms of the ocean. There was so little known about one of these creatures that it took 20 years just to figure out what exactly it was. Things only got weirder from there.

The organism’s distinctive, glowing presence was observed by multiple deep-sea missions between 2000 to 2021 but was simply referred to as “mystery mollusk.” A team of Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) researchers has now reviewed extensive footage of past mystery mollusk sightings and used MBARI’s remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to observe it and collect samples. They’ve given it a name and have finally confirmed that it is a nudibranch—the first and only nudibranch known to live at such depths.

Bathydevius caudactylus, as this nudibranch is now called, lives 1,000–4,000 meters (3,300–13,100 feet) deep in the ocean’s bathypelagic or midnight zone. It moves like a jellyfish, eats like a Venus flytrap, and is bioluminescent, and its genes are distinct enough for it to be classified as the first member of a new phylogenetic family.

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What happens when a gargantuan cloud of gas swallows a pair of monster black holes with their own appetites? Feasting on the gas can cause some weird (heavenly) bodily functions.

AT 2021hdr is a binary supermassive black hole (BSMBH) system in the center of a galaxy 1 billion light-years away, in the Cygnus constellation. In 2021, researchers observing it using NASA’s Zwicky Transient Facility saw strange outbursts that were flagged by the ALerCE (Automatic Learning for the Rapid Classification of Events) team.

This active galactic nucleus (AGN) flared so brightly that AT 2021hdr was almost mistaken for a supernova. Repeating flares soon ruled that out. When the researchers questioned whether they might be looking at a tidal disruption event—a star being torn to shreds by the black holes—something was still not making sense. They then compared observations they made in 2022 using NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to simulations of something else they suspected: a tidal disruption of a gas cloud by binary supermassive black holes. It seemed they had found the most likely answer.

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