Cover picture: An octopus (Octopus vulgaris) performing the task of reaching toward a target (a green plastic disk in the top left of the picture). Octopus movements are extremely flexible, with virtually unlimited degrees of freedom. Their eight arms move in an elegant, efficient, and coordinate manner. To study these movements, octopuses were trained to identify and reach a target. Kinematic analysis of the reaching movements in three dimensions revealed a simple invariant trajectory of a bend propagating along the arm. This invariance suggests a simple and stereotyped control strategy of the reaching movement that may serve to reduce the immense redundancy of the octopus arm movements. See the article by Gutfreund et al. (pp. 7297-7307) for details.
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