Despite their ubiquity in the world’s oceans, the evolutionary origin of the arrow worm has long baffled biologists – Charles Darwin himself noted their “obscurity of affinities” in 1844. Notably, the worm has characteristics of both protostomes, which include arthropods, mollusks, and annelids, and deuterostomes, which covers all animals with a spinal cord. These two groups are thought to have diverged from a common ancestor in the Ediacaran era, about 600 million years ago.

But now, researchers from University College London (UCL), the Goto Laboratory at Mie University, and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have finally pinned down the genomic, epigenomic, and cellular landscape of this enigmatic animal in a study published in Nature. As a planktonic animal, they are almost impossible to culture in the lab – save for one species, Paraspadella gotoi, named in honor of Professor Taichiri Goto, who is the first to successfully breed chaetognaths.

MIT researchers developed a method to design and fabricate reconfigurable antennas with adjustable frequency ranges. Users can adjust the frequency by squeezing, bending, or stretching the material, making the antenna more versatile for sensing and communication than traditional static antennas.  

MIT researchers used sparse autoencoders to shed light on the inner workings of protein language models, an advance that could streamline the process of identifying new drugs or vaccine targets.