It has often been said that nature is history's greatest innovator and if that is true then scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are learning from the ...
Mother nature has a lot to teach us about how to make things.
How nature makes its biominerals—things like teeth, bone and seashells—is a playbook scientists have long been trying to read.
There are few tougher, more durable structures in nature than teeth or seashells. The secret of these materials lies in their unique fine structure: they are composed of different layers in which numerous micro-platelets ...
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with members affiliated with institutions in French Polynesia, France and Qatar has finally proved that pearls do spin inside of oysters as they develop. In their paper published in Royal ...
Nacre, or mother of pearl, has highly attractive mechanical properties but cannot be processed into larger-scale structures. Synthetic nanocomposites can mimic the characteristic brick-and-mortar-like structure of nacre, ...
The risk of injury in professional sport has been a central feature in recent debates about how well protected our stars are. Only recently, Argentine football player Emanuel Ortega died of a fatal head injury after hitting ...
Mollusks got it right. They have soft innards, but their complex exteriors are engineered to protect them in harsh conditions. Engineers at the Indian Institute of Science and Rice University are beginning to understand why.
Mother-of-pearl, the iridescent layer in the shells of some mollusks, inspired a Rice University study that will help scientists and engineers judge the ultimate strength, stiffness and toughness of composite materials for ...
In nacre, layer lattices of inorganic calcium carbonate alternate with layers of organic material. Chitin, collagen and various proteins ensure that the calcium carbonate grows in these defined layers. What role the proteins ...
