Clams called Heart cockles, found in the warm, equatorial waters of the Indo-Pacific, have a mutually beneficial relationship ...

A heart cockle shell has been found to let in light through a design that resembles fiber optic cables. This could inspire ...

When it comes to technologies used only by humans, you might think that fiber optics would rank right up there. Such is ...

More information: Dakota E. McCoy et al, Heart cockle shells transmit sunlight to photosymbiotic algae using bundled fiber optic cables and condensing lenses, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10 ...

Since the first fiber optic cables rolled out in the 1970s, they’ve become a major part of everything from medical devices to ...

A heart cockle shell has been found to let in light through a design that resembles fiber optic cables. This could inspire everything from helping... What a mollusc shell and fiber optic cables ...

Unlike clams, the heart cockle doesn't need to open wide to bask in the sun. It has a clever trick up its shell: tiny, ...

Using a laser scanning microscope to study the 3D geometry of heart cockle shells, the researchers discovered that beneath each window, tiny translucent bumps smaller than a grain of sand function ...

Tiny, solid windows in the shells of heart cockles let in light for the photosynthetic algae inside them – and they could show us how to make better fibre-optic cables ...