Dive Africa Sharm

Meet the argonaut octopus, or paper nautilus. The ‘paper nautilus’ isn’t actually a nautilus. These creatures derive their name from the paper-thin, spiralled shell that females produce to shield their eggs.

Argonauts are the world’s only pelagic octopuses. Instead of living near a structure on the seafloor, like a rocky shoreline or coral reef, like most octopus species, argonauts spend their lives floating near the surface of the open ocean.

After creating her egg case, the female gulps an air bubble at the surface and seals it into the shell with her te****les. Then she dives down until the weight of the compressed air cancels out the weight of her shell, making her neutrally buoyant in the water column. (Nautiluses, on the other hand, have shells with built-in air chambers.) Then the female argonaut deposits her eggs inside the shell and waits for a male to fertilize them.

Male argonauts use a modified arm, known as a hectocotylus, to transfer their s***m to the female. This special te****le, found in a pouch under their left eye, has small grooves to hold the s***m securely in place. But the males don’t just reach out and pass off a parcel of s***m. Oh no. They detach their own arm and give it to the female.

The female inserts the hectocotylus into her egg case, holding onto it until she’s ready to fertilize her eggs. The male dies, or so we think.

Live, male argonauts have never been observed in the wild - strangely enough 😳

The Amazon molly (Poecilia formosa) is a freshwater fish native to the warm waters of northeastern Mexico and the southern parts of the U.S. state of Texas. It reproduces through gynogenesis, and essentially all individuals are females. The common name of "Amazon molly," acknowledges this trait as a reference to the Amazon warriors, a female-run society in Greek mythology. In 1932, this species was the first vertebrate confirmed to be capable of asexual reproduction.

Okay, we had to check this (and we’re still not sure), but this is a Hexactinellid sponge, more commonly known as a glass sponge, and they are literally made of glass.

Glass sponges do not have true nerves, brains, or a nervous system. However, they are unique among sponges because their bodies form a continuous web of tissue that can rapidly conduct electrical impulses to coordinate responses—such as stopping their water-pumping filters when they detect debris.

They are among the longest-lived animals on the planet, with the oldest verified as being 11,000 years old and 15,000 years being the generally agreed maximum age. With fossils dating back 600 million years, they are one of the earliest multicellular animals. Thought to have gone extinct 40 million years ago. In 1987, however, a team of Canadian scientists discovered 9,000-year-old living glass sponge reefs on British Columbia’s northern coast. To date, these are the only such reefs known to exist.

If you’d like to see glass sponges, you’ll need to buckle-up, as they are found between 450-900 metres.

Yay! for H2O

In 1872, during early oceanographic surveys, scientists began mapping the seafloor and measuring the true extent of Earth’s oceans. What they discovered reshaped how we describe our planet. The world was not made of 70% water instead, water covered around 70% of its surface, forming a thin, fragile layer over rock, mantle, and metal deep below. From space, that layer turns Earth into a glowing blue world. But beneath the oceans lie mountains, ridges, and vast continental plates a solid planet wearing a shimmering coat of water. The oceans do not define Earth’s composition. They shape its surface… and protect its life. A delicate film of water regulates climate, carves valleys, feeds clouds, and reflects sunlight back into space turning our world into the only known planet where liquid water flows freely across the surface.

Octopuses lead mixed-species hunting parties with fish like goatfish and groupers, sharing leadership and sometimes punching unruly fish to keep them in line. A published study in Nature Ecology & Evolution shows that these groups use shared control.

Multidimensional social influence drives leadership and composition-dependent success in octopus–fish hunting groups - Nature Ecology & Evolution Using three-dimensional field-based tracking and field experiments, the authors find that octopus–fish collective hunting groups exhibit complex functional dynamics and composition-dependent properties, in which different members of the group lead on different decisions.

And it was real fiddly weighing them

A scientist who grew up waiting for the water truck as a refugee has built a machine that pulls drinking water straight out of dry desert air, using nothing but sunlight.

His name is Omar Yaghi, a chemist at UC Berkeley and a 2025 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry. His invention can harvest up to 1,000 liters of clean water a day, and remarkably, it works even in brutally dry places where the air holds less than 20 percent humidity. It has been successfully tested in conditions as harsh as Death Valley, one of the driest places on Earth.

The secret is a class of materials Yaghi pioneered called metal organic frameworks, or M*Fs. These are synthetic, sponge like crystals riddled with microscopic pores, and their internal surface area is staggering. Just a few grams of M*F can have a surface area comparable to a football field. As air passes through, the M*Fs trap water molecules in their tiny pores. Then, when gently warmed by ordinary sunlight, the material releases that moisture as v***r, which condenses into pure liquid water.

What makes it so elegant is what it does not need. No electricity, no refrigerants, no complex cooling systems. It runs entirely off grid on the sun's heat alone, which means it can be dropped into remote villages, disaster zones, or islands hit by hurricanes and simply work. The large scale version is about the size of a shipping container.

A fair note. These are early field ready units from his company, and scaling the technology to serve huge populations is still a work in progress. It is a powerful breakthrough, not yet a finished global fix.

The most moving part is why he built it. Yaghi grew up in a refugee community in Jordan, where his family listened for the water truck and rushed to fill containers before it ran dry. He turned that childhood memory into a machine that could bring water to millions who still live that reality, as the UN warns over two billion people lack safe drinking water.

If clean water could truly be pulled from the air anywhere on Earth, how much do you think it would change the world?

Source: UC Berkeley, Atoco, Omar Yaghi