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There aren't that many movies specifically set on New Year's Eve, but one of the best is The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), Joel and Ethan Coen's visually striking, affectionate homage to classic Hollywood screwball comedies. The film turned 30 this year, so it's the perfect opportunity for a rewatch.

(WARNING: Spoilers below.)

The Coen brothers started writing the script for The Hudsucker Proxy when Joel was working as an assistant editor on Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead (1981). Raimi ended up co-writing the script, as well as making a cameo appearance as a brainstorming marketing executive.  The Coen brothers took their inspiration from the films of Preston Sturgess and Frank Capra, among others, but the intent was never to satirize or parody those films. "It's the case where, having seen those movies, we say 'They're really fun—let's do one!'; as opposed to "They're really fun—let's comment upon them,'" Ethan Coen has said.

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Manta rays are elegantly shaped. They swim by flapping their fins like enormous wings, and their gills filter for plankton with the utmost precision. These creatures have now inspired human innovations that take soft robots and water filters to the next level.

With fins that borrow their shape and motion from mantas, a soft robot created by a team of researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of Virginia improves on a previous model by reaching speeds of 6.8 body lengths per second, nearly double what its predecessor was capable of. This makes it the fastest soft robot so far. It is also more energy-efficient than its previous iteration and can swim not just on the surface, but upward and downward, just like an actual manta ray.

Another research team at MIT used the gills of these creatures, which filter for plankton, to improve commercial water filtration systems. Their gill openings are also the perfect size to help them breathe while they feed, absorbing oxygen from water on its way out. The rays’ balance of feeding and breathing helped the researchers figure out a filter structure that more precisely controls inflow and outflow.

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