Tuna are highly efficient swimmers, migrating thousands of miles across the Pacific from California to Japan. They are also among the fastest fish in the water reaching speeds of nearly 50 miles per hour. George Lauder has been trying to understand how they are capable of both by developing robots to model tuna's flexible underwater gait.

Working with a team of researchers from the University of Virginia, Lauder developed Tunabot, the first robotic tuna that accurately mimics both their highly efficient swimming style and high speed. Tunabot is described in a paper published...

Prof. L. Mahadevan collaborated with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) to discover what controls the size of an embryo. The study published in Nature found that embryos maintain an average size in early development through simple hydraulic pressure. During early stages of embryonic development, a fluid-filled cavity grows and expands. Using mouse embryos, researchers observed that the cavity repeated the process...

Roopkund Lake is a small body of water nestled deep in the Himalayan mountains. The Lake is known colloquially as Skeleton Lake due to the remains of several hundred ancient human bones scattered around its shores. The skeletons have never been studied so little was known of the origins. 

Graduate student, Éadaoin Harney (Wakeley Lab) and an international team of researchers analyzed the remains using bioarcheological analysis (including ancient DNA, radiocarbon dating, stable...

The non-trilobite arthropod (the largest phylum in the animal kingdom, which includes such familiar forms as lobsters, crabs and spiders) Sinoburius lunaris has been known for approximately three decades, but few details of its anatomy are well understood due to its rarity within the early Cambrian Chengjiang biota in Southern China, and the technical limitations for studying these fossils. In a new paper by Javier Ortega-Hernández in collaboration with Prof. Yu Liu, Yunnan University, China, researchers use microCT to show in great detail...