Most adhesives can’t stick to wet surfaces because water and other fluids disrupt the adhesive’s bonding mechanisms. This problem, though, has been beautifully solved by evolution in remora suckerfish, which use an adhesive disk on top of their heads to attach to animals like dolphins, sharks, and even manta rays.

A team of MIT scientists has now taken a close look at these remora disks and reverse-engineered them. “Basically, we looked at nature for inspiration,” says Giovanni Traverso, a professor at MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering and senior author of the study.

Sticking Variety

Remora adhesive disks are an evolutionary adaptation of the fish’s first dorsal fin, the one that in other species sits on top of the body, just behind the head and gill covers. The disk rests on an intercalary backbone—a bone structure that most likely evolved from parts of the spine. This bony structure supports lamellae, specialized bony plates with tiny backward-facing spikes called spinules. The entire disk is covered with soft tissue compartments that are open at the top. “This makes the remora fish adhere very securely to soft-bodied, fast-moving marine hosts,” Traverso says.

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James Lovell, a member of humanity's first trip to the moon and commander of NASA's ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, has died at the age of 97.

Lovell's death on Thursday was announced by the space agency.

"NASA sends its condolences to the family of Capt. Jim Lovell, whose life and work inspired millions of people across the decades," said acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy in a statement on Friday. "Jim's character and steadfast courage helped our nation reach the moon and turned a potential tragedy into a success from which we learned an enormous amount. We mourn his passing even as we celebrate his achievements."

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When a Spinosaurus attacked a T. rex in Jurassic Park III , both giant carnivores tried to finish the fight with one powerful bite of their bone-crushing jaws. The Spinosaurus won, because when the movie was being made back in the early 2000s,  fossil discoveries suggested it was the largest carnivorous dinosaur that ever lived. But new research provides evidence that size and weight didn’t always create a powerful bite.

“The Spinosaurus and the T. rex didn’t live at the same time at the same continent, but if they did, I don’t really see the Spinosaurus winning,” says Andre Rowe, a paleobiologist at the University of Bristol. He led a study analyzing the biomechanics of skulls belonging to the largest carnivorous dinosaurs. Based on his findings, T. rex was most likely was the apex predator we’ve always believed it to be. The story of other giant carnivorous dinosaurs, though, was a bit more complicated.

Staring down the giants

“Of the giant carnivore dinosaurs, T. rex is the one we know the most about because it has a pretty good fossil record,” Rowe says. There are many complete skulls which have already been scanned and analyzed, and this is how we know the T. rex had an extremely high bite force—one of the highest known in the animal kingdom. We have far fewer fossil records of other giant carnivores like Spinosaurus or Allosaurus , so we assumed they were similar to T. rex .

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Texas is gearing up for war as a savage, flesh-eating fly appears poised for a US invasion and is expanding its range of victims.

On Friday, the Texas Department of Agriculture announced the debut of TDA Swormlure , a synthetic bait designed to attract the flies with a scent that mimics open flesh wounds, which are critical to the lifecycle of the fly, called the New World Screwworm. The parasite exploits any open wound or orifice on a wide range of warm-blooded animals to feed its ravenous spawn. Female flies lay hundreds of eggs in even the tiniest abrasion. From there, screw-shaped larvae—which give the flies their name—emerge to literally twist and bore into their victim, eating them alive and causing a putrid, life-threatening lesion.

The new lure for the flies is just one of several defense efforts in Texas, which stands to suffer heavy losses from an invasion. Screwworms are a ferocious foe to many animals, but are particularly devastating to livestock.

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OpenAI's GPT-5 model went live for most ChatGPT users this week, but lots of people use ChatGPT not through OpenAI's interface but through other platforms or tools. One of the largest deployments is iOS, the iPhone operating system, which allows users to make certain queries via GPT-4o. It turns out those users won't have to wait long for the latest model: Apple will switch to GPT-5 in iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS Tahoe 26, according to 9to5Mac .

Apple has not officially announced when those OS updates will be released to users' devices, but these major releases have typically been released in September in recent years.

The new model had already rolled out on some other platforms, like the coding tool GitHub Copilot via public preview , as well as Microsoft's general-purpose Copilot .

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Take a deep breath and prepare yourself, because the "saga of the green dildos" is going to get really, really dumb.

Now take another one, just to steel yourself—this story involves crypto and memecoins, after all.

Ready? Okay.

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I unequivocally loved the first season of The Sandman , the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman's influential graphic novel series (of which I am longtime fan). I thought it captured the surreal, dream-like feel and tone of its source material, striking a perfect balance between the anthology approach of the graphic novels and grounding the narrative by focusing on the arc of its central figure: Morpheus, lord of the Dreaming.  It's been a long wait for the second and final season, but S2 retains all those elements to bring Dream's story to its inevitably tragic, yet satisfying, end.

(Spoilers below; some major S2 reveals after the second gallery. We'll give you a heads-up when we get there.)

When Netflix announced in January that The Sandman would end with S2, speculation abounded that this was due to sexual misconduct allegations against Gaiman (who has denied them). However, showrunner Allan Heinberg wrote on X that the plan had long been for there to be only two seasons because the show's creators felt they had only enough material to fill two seasons, and frankly, they were right. The first season covered the storylines of Preludes and Nocturnes and A Doll's House , with bonus episodes adapting "Dream of a Thousand Cats" and "Calliope" from Dream Country .

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Advocacy groups that tried to defend federal net neutrality rules in court won't file an appeal, saying they don't trust the Supreme Court to rule fairly on the issue.

Net neutrality rules were implemented by the Federal Communications Commission during the Obama era, repealed during Trump's first term, and revived under Biden. Telecom lobby groups challenged the Biden-era restoration of net neutrality rules and beat the FCC at the US Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit.

While the FCC is now run by Republicans who oppose net neutrality rules, advocacy groups that were involved in the litigation could appeal the ruling. But they won't, saying in a press release that there isn't much point because of the conservative majorities at both the FCC and Supreme Court. Even if the Supreme Court overturned the appeals court ruling, the current FCC would almost certainly eliminate the rules again.

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Companies are monitoring whether employees adhere to corporate return-to-office (RTO) policies and are enforcing the requirements more than they have in the past five years, according to a report that commercial real estate firm CBRE will release next week and that Ars Technica reviewed.

CBRE surveyed 184 companies for its report. Among companies surveyed, 69 percent are monitoring whether employees come into the office as frequently as policy mandates. That’s an increase from 45 percent last year.

Seventy-three percent of companies surveyed said that employees are coming into the office as frequently as their employer wants, which is an increase from 61 percent last year. The average number of days required in-office by companies surveyed was 3.2 days, but actual in-office attendance on average is 2.9 days or, at companies with 10,000 or more employees, 2.5 days.

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