fish

It’s been a few years since the race to make biofuel from algae really heated up. Today more than 50 companies are trying to find a way to affordably squeeze oil from slime, and it seems like the golden age for these tiny autotrophs.

Even though a jellyfish is 90 percent water, it moves at about 40 mph. Jellyfish use their bell -- the top portion, above the tentacles -- to create a jet that propels them through water. Now, scientists at the Chonnam National University in the Republic of Korea have built a robot that mimics the movement. The robot, using an electro-active polymer artificial muscle, retracts and expands its skirt, exerting a minimal voltage and propelling the jellybot faster than you can swim.

Overfishing made the grey nurse shark endangered, but it's the animal's bizarre, cannibalistic embryos that are making it difficult for the species to rebound. The gestating shark pups need a "time out," says Nick Otway, a fisheries biologist at Port Stephens Fisheries Institute in Australia. As a last-ditch effort to keep the species from eating itself into extinction, he built an artificial uterus, a souped-up fish tank that will give each unborn baby its own womb.

Great white whales. Schools of fish so thick they slowed boats. Sea monsters that could swallow a sailor whole. The last one may still be the stuff of lore, but scientists are using a curious series of census tools to gather evidence of an ocean that, as recently as decades ago, fairly teemed with marine life, far bigger and more plentiful that what's found in today's oceans.

For all you holiday anglers, today's featured Invention Award winner is something to aspire to: a fishing lure that doesn't pollute once it ends up on the bottom of the lake.

Ben Hobbins didn’t set out to clean up his local lakes, but his IronClads baits do exactly that. The Wisconsin inventor’s idea — fishing lures that are extra-strong, eco-friendly and nontoxic — solves a serious, if little-known environmental problem.

After a trip to the Amazon jungle, President Teddy Roosevelt famously reported seeing a pack of piranhas devour a cow in a few minutes. It must have been a very large school of fish—-or a very small cow. According to Ray Owczarzak, assistant curator of fishes at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, it would probably take 300 to 500 piranhas five minutes to strip the flesh off a 180-pound human. But would this attack even happen?

The brownsnout spookfish is not like other fish.

This deep-sea dweller’s eyes have two segements, one of which, in contrast to all other vertebrates, has mirrors instead of lenses to accurately image its surroundings.

The normal, lens-equipped part [orange globes] sees above the fish; the mirrored part [black dots] sees to the sides and below.

We bet that SciKu, the delicate science poetry that belongs to everyone, will last and last. As did, apparently, a 300-million-year-old brain found inside a rock in northeast Kansas:

Fish brain turned to stone
Alas! Fossilization:
It's not just for bone