Brendan Monroe’s nature illustration.

It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s Hello Kitty.

That’s what a seventh grade student from California had in mind when she came up with her dream science project: sending a Hello Kitty doll her dad brought back from a business trip in Japan into space.

Lauren Rojas, a 12-year-old from Antioch, Calif., got the idea after seeing a television commercial in which a balloon was launched into the sky. She thought she could do the same with her Hello Kitty doll. She would test air pressure and temperature at high altitude for her school’s science fair.

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THIS Week’s Talk: DISGUISE AND DECEPTIVE APPEARANCE

The skin of the cuttlefish and the rest of the octopus family are lined with two layers of color-producing cells. The top layer is pigmented with red, yellow, and brown and the bottom layer shifts its iridescent colors depending on the angle of light.

Then, the brain passes signals and information to the skin layers and the layers match its surroundings. The cuttlefish can fool a predator in two ways, creating a close match to the background or a pattern that disrupts recognition shape of the cuttlefish.