Design features

These spiders copy themselves by sculpting larger duplicates complete with eight legs and animate them like puppets to fool predators.

Evolution can’t explain the hummingbird and incredible speed this tiny bird flaps its wings.

Rapid colour change in mirror spiders, sequined spiders and similar ‘white’ spiders derives from crystalline guanine in guanocytes.

Fruit flies have the surprising ability to distinguish chemicals they never evolved to process.

Refuting claims of bad design in Human Errors: A Panorama of our Glitches by Nathan Lents.

Some have speculated that the idea of atlatl/woomera-assisted spearthrowing came from watching herons use their crook-neck posture to hunt.

How do our lungs work?

Praying mantis stereopsis: brain computes depth by comparing changing images from its two eyes

Spiderwebs stronger than Kevlar.

How does a skunk make such a stink?

Rapid geology and Great Britain’s Jurassic Coast.

Cuttlefish colour changes inspire new energy-efficient TV screen design.

Scientists finally discover how the female argonaut (paper nautilus—not to be confused with the nautiloids) really uses its shell

Erez Ribak’s research shows that our ‘backwardly-wired’ retina is an ideal structure to optimize colour vision, thanks to the fibre optic plate of Müller glial cells.

Why do animals help each other?

The super-strength of conch shell indicates it was designed by a master engineer.