Jellyfish | featured news

Endurance swimmer Diana Nyad suspended her latest attempt to swim from Florida to Cuba early Tuesday, after being hampered by more jellyfish stings and strong overnight storms. Angie Sollinger, a senior member of Nyad’s support team, told NBC producer Matt German that Nyad has been pulled out of the water suffering from extreme exhaustion.

Using rat heart cells and silicone polymer, researchers have bioengineered a "jellyfish" that knows how to swim. The odd jellyfish mimic, dubbed a "Medusoid" by its creators, is more than a curiosity. It's a natural biological pump, just like the human heart. That makes it a good model to use to study cardiac physiology, said study researcher Kevin Kit Parker, a bioengineer at Harvard University.

Four hours into a family fishing trip, rough waves flipped a 22-foot boat off the Florida Keys, tossing eight people overboard. Seven of them, including a 4-year-old girl, survived by clinging to their capsized vessel and a small blue cooler for almost 20 hours, suffering exhaustion, jellyfish stings and hypothermia....

A nuclear power plant in Scotland was forced to close after jellyfish inundated its water filters, clogging the cooling system.

How can one jellyfish sting up to 100 people? With lots of stinger-equipped tentacles, the largest jellyfish in the world may be up to the job, though scientists aren't sure if this week's mass stinging was the result of one jellyfish or more than one.