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 ...

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

Arbacia punctulata, the purple-spined sea urchin, is native to the western Atlantic Ocean along the eastern coast of the US and the Gulf of Mexico, where it usually lives on rock or shell substrates.

Last weekend, a lone, gray heart-shaped shell drifted ashore, nestling itself upon a beach in Cornwall, England. It was quickly joined by another—and then another. Before long, hundreds of these ...