COVER An isopod (Idotea balthica), a type of crustacean, covers itself with male gametes while feeding on the epiphytes of the red alga Gracilaria gracilis. Isopods facilitate algal fertilization by carrying spermatia on their bodies. Such animal-mediated fertilization is akin to pollination in flowering plants. See pages 471 and 528.

Photo: Wilfried Thomas, Station Biologique de Roscoff

ONLINE COVER A 3D-printed human model slams hand-first against the water surface. The pointy front shape of this posture causes a slower increase of the slamming force compared to feet-first or head-first dives. Diving is a trait across the animal kingdom and its most common functions are to find prey and evade predators. Pandey et al. demonstrate how similarity of diving fronts (i.e., curved snouts, flat feet, or diving hand-first) unifies the slamming force across diving animals and humans. The authors elucidate the maximum height above which amateur diving leads to injury of the cervical spine, spinal cord, neck, collarbone, and knee, shedding light on a hydrodynamics-based protocol for safe high diving.

ONLINE COVER Sex Bias and CD8 T Cell Exhaustion in Cancer. This month’s illustration shows male and female silhouettes between layers of cancerous tissue. These objects are wrapped in projected images of multicolor immunofluorescence staining of mouse bladder tumor tissue. The featured Research Article by Kwon et al. identifies T cell–intrinsic effects of androgen as a contributor to sex bias in CD8 T cell–mediated tumor immunity. A related Focus by Bevilacqua and Ho discusses how androgen receptor effects contribute to sex-biased incidence and outcomes in cancer.

ONLINE COVER A Model of Oneself. Robots, like humans and animals, require self-models to be able to anticipate and plan future actions. Chen et al. developed a method that enables a robot arm to model its morphology and kinematics using an approach based on query-driven visual self-modeling. This month’s cover is a multiple-exposure image of a self-modeled robot arm touching a small red sphere while avoiding a large red cube.

ONLINE COVER This week, Liao et al. show that, in male mice, the proinflammatory cytokine IL-6 promotes cartilage degeneration and nociceptive innervation in osteoarthritic joints through distinct downstream mediators. The image is a cross section through the knee of a male mouse stained to show the accumulation of NITEGE, a cartilage extracellular matrix degradation product, in osteoarthritis.

ONLINE COVER Targeting Cancer Cells and Immune Cells. The cover image shows a melanoma tumor from a patient with advanced disease. Tumor cells expressing the melanoma cell marker SOX10 (yellow) are ringed by CD11c-expressing dendritic cells (red), and T cells (magenta). This issue of Science Translational Medicine features a Focus article by Anna Obenauf, the winner of the 2022 AAAS Martin and Rose Wachtel Cancer Research Award, which is given each year to a young scientist who has made important contributions to the field of cancer research.