Someday, optical communications and high-speed computing might owe their success to a little ocean creature: the sea urchin. Materials scientists have fabricated a photonic crystal using a piece of ...

Materials researchers love sea creatures. Mother-of-pearl provokes ideas for smooth surfaces, clams inspire gluey substances, shark's skin is used to develop materials that reduce drag in water, and ...

The pointy shell of sea urchins hides a remarkably complex neural network that resembles the brains of vertebrates, new research suggests.

Building on a concept first introduced by the late Danish engineer Ture Wester, the designers have created a minimalist modular system that is lightweight and self-supporting, expansive, and yet ...

A mountain of sea urchin shells, about 5000 specimens, was found in recent days by the Barracellare Company on the northern coast of Alghero. The echinoderms had been emptied, probably to obtain the ...

When it comes to their neighbors in Norway, the good people of Denmark and Sweden have a limitless fount of jokes, many of which are reductive and in questionable taste; none of which should, under ...

BAR HARBOR, MAINE -- Nov. 9, 2006 Who would have guessed that the lowly sea urchin, that brain-less, limb-less porcupine of the sea, would be the star of a multi-million dollar, worldwide effort to ...

A sea urchin is a study in contradictions: tenacious and spiky on the outside, vulnerable and velvety on the inside. With a beauty both fragile and fierce, it can burrow for decades into rock, but die ...