The cephalopod's disappearing act could help your next sunscreen blend in. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Cephalopods like octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish have the mesmerizing ability to change the color of their skin to camouflage into the surrounding environment. Multiple biological processes involving a natural pigment called xanthommatin drives this unique ability. As such, various industries are interested in using xanthommatin in products such as paint and natural sunscreen, but the pigment has been hard to research.

Octopus arms are the animal kingdom's most flexible A mating pair of wild Octopus americanus, one displaying the arm action "raise." Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. With three hearts, blue blood, and eight arms that seem to have a mind of their own, octopuses are among the ocean's most fascinating creatures . Their signature limbs and complex nervous system help them explore, communicate, capture prey, and mate in many marine habitats. Now, scientists are unlocking some of the secrets embedded in these arms, namely whether they have some degree of "handedness."

There are many remarkable things about octopuses--they're famously intelligent, they have three hearts, their eyeballs work like prisms, they can change color at will, and they can "see" light with their skin. One of the most striking things about these creatures, however, is the fact that each of their eight arms almost seems to have a mind of its own, allowing an octopus to multitask in a manner that humans can only dream about. At the heart of each arm is a structure known as the axial nervous cord (ANC), and a new study published January 15 in Nature Communications examines how the structure of this cord is fundamental to allowing the arms to act as they do. Cassady Olson, first author on the paper, explains to Popular Science that understanding the ANC is crucial to understanding how an octopus's arms work: "You can think of the ANC as equivalent to a spinal cord running down the center of every single arm." Olson explains that "there are many gross similarities [between the ANC and vertebrates' spinal cords]--there is a cell body region, a neuropil region, and long tracts to connect the arms and brains in each."

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bipartisan bill Friday making it a crime to farm octopuses for human consumption in California. The new law makes it illegal to raise and breed octopuses in state waters or in aquaculture tanks based on land within the state. It also prevents business owners and operators from knowingly participating in the sale of an octopus -- regardless of its provenance -- that has been raised to be eaten by people. The text of the law recognizes that octopuses are "highly intelligent, curious, problem-solving animals" that are conscious, sentient and experience "pain, stress, and fear, as well as pleasure, equanimity, and social bonds." It goes on to note that in research studies, these eight-legged marine invertebrates have demonstrated long-term memory as well as the ability to recognize individual people.

Female octopuses have been caught on video launching shells at males attempting to mate with them. Scientists at the University of Sydney recorded gloomy octopuses, or Octopus tetricus, in Jervis Bay in Australia with underwater cameras. They watched them repeatedly throw marine debris using their siphon - a tube-shaped structure that can draw water in an out of its body. As they have to move their siphon to an unusual position to do this, it is assumed to be a deliberate manoeuvre. Throws were performed by both sexes, but it was female octopuses 66 per cent of the time, and sometimes occurred during mating attempts.

Are intelligent aliens living among us? A newly published novel just might lead you to think so -- and in this case, the aliens aren't visitors from another planet. Instead, they're octopuses, the eight-legged denizens of the deep that are celebrated in movies (including the Oscar-winning documentary "My Octopus Teacher") and on the ice rink (thanks to the Kraken, the Seattle hockey team that's getting set for its second NHL season.) Ray Nayler, who wrote the novel titled "The Mountain in the Sea," says he chose the octopus to serve as the designated alien for his science-fiction plot in part because it's "a creature that has a structure totally different from ours, but in whom we recognize curiosity, which is what I think we find often most human in ourselves." Nayler doesn't stop there: The promises and perils of artificial intelligence also figure prominently in the plot -- in a way that sparks musings about how we'll deal with AI, with kindred species on our planet, and perhaps eventually with extraterrestrial intelligence as well.

Whether it's playing tennis or writing an essay, most people have a preferred hand. Now, a study has shown that despite having eight arms to choose from, octopuses also have favourite appendages. Researchers from the University of Minnesota recorded octopuses attacking various prey, and found they preferred certain arms over others when hunting. The team hopes the findings could be used to develop next-generation, highly manipulative soft robots. 'If we can learn from octopuses, then we can apply that to making an underwater vehicle or soft robot application,' said Dr Trevor Wardill, an author of the study.

Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer in Google's Responsible AI organisation, recently made claims that one of the company's products was a sentient being with consciousness and a soul. Field experts have not backed him up, and Google has placed him on paid leave.Lemoine's claims are about the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot called laMDA. But I am most interested in the general question: If an AI were sentient in some relevant sense, how would we know? What standard should we apply? It is easy to mock Lemoine, but will our own future guesses be much better? The most popular standard is what is known as the "Turing test": If a human converses with an AI programme but cannot tell it is an AI programme, then it has passed the Turing test.

We are about 25 years from an AI asking us why we think we have the right to own them. What are we going to say to them? We've had plenty of time to prepare. Science fiction writers have been considering the idea since Isaac Asimov wrote the Bicentennial Man, and probably well before. Star Trek has explored it head-on on at least two occasions, and the entire character arcs of both Data and The Doctor revolve around this question.

In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared on Nautilus in our "Universality" issue in April, 2021. It all started with an odd pile of shells: a pile that, upon closer inspection, fell apart like a flower losing its petals, introducing a burned-out nature documentarian named Craig Foster--and, in time, the world--to the octopus hiding cleverly inside. Known simply as "her," she would become the star of My Octopus Teacher, the Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary and surprise pandemic hit that told the story of Foster's unlikely relationship with that eight-armed mollusk. Released in September 2020, it arrived at the perfect moment. Audiences exhausted by lockdowns and unrelenting 2020-ness were primed for escape into the undersea fantasia of South Africa's kelp forests, where Foster met her. Best-selling books like The Soul of an Octopus and Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness had whetted public curiosity about these uncannily intelligent creatures with whom humans last shared a common ancestor 600 million years ago. Yet while most writing about octopuses emphasizes their ostensibly alien, unknowable nature,1 and serious, science-minded nature documentaries elevate concern about biodiversity over sentiment for a single animal, My Octopus Teacher defied convention. It embraced Foster's feelings for the octopus, which over the course of a year evolved from curiosity to care--even to love. And though her own feelings were left for viewers to interpret, the film's indelible impression was of nature populated by species who are not only beautiful and exquisitely evolved and ecologically important, but highly sentient, too.