Enlarge / Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared in 2014 somewhere over the Indian Ocean. Scientists have reconstructed a possible debris origin point and drift path by extracting information about ocean temperatures from barnacle shells. (credit: Laurent Errera/CC BY-SA 2.0 )

It's one of the biggest mysteries in modern aviation history. In March 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport en route to Beijing and lost communication about 38 minutes into the flight. Military radar tracked the aircraft as it veered off course before the signal (and the plane) disappeared somewhere over the Andaman Sea and Indian Ocean.

All 12 crew members and 227 passengers were presumed dead, and search-and-rescue efforts yielded no signs of the doomed plane apart from a few pieces of debris that washed up on coastal shores months later. Now, scientists have partially reconstructed the possible origin and drift path of that debris via a novel means: extracting data about ocean temperatures stored in shells of barnacles, according to a new paper published in the journal AGU Advances.

“Knowing the tragic story behind the mystery motivated everyone involved in this project to get the data and have this work published,” said co-author Nasser Al-Qattan , who recently received his PhD from the University of South Florida. “The plane disappeared more than nine years ago, and we all worked aiming to introduce a new approach to help resume the search, suspended in January 2017, which might help bring some closure to the families of those on the missing plane.”

Enlarge / The wunderpus, one of the two species of octopus that we can now identify through the unique pattern of their stripes. (credit: Divelvanov )

Octopuses and other camouflaging cephalopods may be the literal embodiment of “now you see me, now you don’t.” Using both rapid color and texture changes, octopuses can blend into nearly every environment by mimicking things like fish on the sea floor or plants swaying with the waves. A cephalopod’s seamless camouflage makes it tricky for researchers to identify, track, and monitor these creatures in the wild, which has limited our ability to study them.

This may change for some species, thanks to new research from the University of California, Berkeley, published in PLOS ONE. The UC Berkeley researchers studying the lesser Pacific striped octopus (also called the zebra octopus, Octopus chierchiae ) , found that the animals’ striping patterns seemed to be individualized, similar to our fingerprint patterns. As this small cephalopod has previously been recommended as a new model organism for future studies, having these octopus “fingerprints” could help to solidify O. chierchiae’s place as the poster child for cephalopod research.

Cultivating laboratory octopuses

Studying octopuses in a laboratory is not for the faint-hearted. Most species usually live for one to three years and produce only one clutch of eggs during that time, making it difficult to track any sort of genetic lineage. Their intelligence and impish behavior make it tricky to keep them in an artificial habitat. Octopuses are predatory creatures, so they require the mental stimulation of hunting, along with special diets to maintain their well-being. Previous studies have shown that caged octopuses will cannibalize each other without proper nourishment.

Juvenile snapping shrimp now hold the acceleration record for a repeatable body movement underwater. They can snap their claws at accelerations on par with a bullet shot from a gun. (credit: Harrison and Patek, 2023)

The snapping shrimp , aka the pistol shrimp, is one of the loudest creatures in the ocean, thanks to the snaps produced by its whip-fast claws. And juvenile snapping shrimp are even faster than their fully grown elders, according to a recent paper published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. Juvenile claws accelerate as fast as a bullet shot from a gun when they snap, essentially setting a new acceleration record for a repeated movement performed underwater.

As we've reported previously, the source of that loud snap is an impressive set of asymmetrically sized claws; the larger of the two produces the snap. Each snap also produces a powerful shockwave that can stun or even kill a small fish. That shockwave produces collapsing bubbles that emit a barely visible flash of light—a rare natural example of sonoluminescence .

Scientists believe that the snapping is used for communication, as well as for hunting. A shrimp on the prowl will hide in a burrow or similar obscured spot, extending antennae to detect any passing fish. When it does, the shrimp emerges from its hiding place, pulls back its claw, and lets loose with a powerful snap, producing the deadly shockwave. It can then pull the stunned prey back into the burrow to feed.

Enlarge (credit: Cultura RF/Alexander Semenov )

In the past, scientists thought of the deep ocean as a cold, dead place. While the region—generally considered to be everything between 200 and 11,000 meters in depth—is undoubtedly cold, it actually holds unexpected biodiversity.

“Back in the 1970s, there was this myth of the deep sea as this empty desert wasteland with nothing alive. For many years, we’ve known this is absolutely false,” Julia Sigwart, a researcher at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Germany, told Ars.

However, the abyss and the life within it remain poorly understood, despite making up around three-quarters of the area covered by the ocean. At this year’s United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15), Sigwart and her international colleagues presented a policy brief that urges more support for research into the biodiversity of the deep ocean, particularly as the region begins to be threatened by human activities.

Enlarge (credit: ullstein bild / Getty Images )

The V-1302 John Mahn has sat at the bottom of the North Sea off Belgium for decades. The ship began its life in Germany as a 48-meter-long fishing vessel. However, during the Second World War, the Nazi Kriegsmarine requisitioned it for use as a patrol boat. On February 12, 1942, a squadron of six British Royal Air Force planes struck it with two bombs. It sank.

It wasn’t just the boat that sank, however. Along with it went its stores of coal and its remaining ammunition, among other chemicals. While the boat’s no longer a Nazi threat, new research suggests that it has been leaking pollution—including various heavy metals—into the North Sea ever since. This, in turn, has changed the surrounding environment at a microbial level. The research is part of the North Sea Wrecks project , an effort to aid in the identification and mitigation of wrecks and their environmental impacts in the region.

“We wanted to see if old shipwrecks in our part of the sea … were still shaping the local microbial communities and if they were still affecting the surrounding sediment. This microbial analysis is unique within the project,” Josefien Van Landuyt, a PhD candidate at Ghent University and one of the paper’s authors, said in a press release.

Enlarge / Plankton are under real threat as our oceans warm and acidify, but they're not all gone yet. (credit: tonaquatic/Getty Images)

For the past few days, it has been hard to look at social media without coming across a scary-looking report from the Scottish newspaper The Sunday Post. " Scots team’s research finds Atlantic plankton all but wiped out in catastrophic loss of life ," reads the breathless headline. The article claims that a survey of plankton in the ocean found that "evidence... suggest[s] 90% has now vanished." The article then goes on to predict the imminent collapse of our biosphere.

There's just one problem: The article is utter rubbish.

The Sunday Post uses as its source a preprint manuscript —meaning it hasn't been peer-reviewed yet—from lead author Howard Dryden at the Global Oceanic Environmental Survey.