Starfish Control Hundreds of Feet Without a Brain. Here's How.

Starfish (aka sea stars) are master climbers. These many-armed invertebrates traverse vertical, horizontal, and even upside-down surfaces: it seems no substrate is too rocky, slimy, sandy, or glassy. And they do so without a centralized nervous system, let alone a brain.
A new paper written by an international team of biologists and engineers reveals that starfish locomotion is nonetheless rather clever, with built-in features that allow starfish to drastically adapt their motion depending on the challenge at hand (or, rather,