Institute For The Future

Nature's Lego

Like many new sciences, the nascent field of biomimicry has several paradigmatic discoveries that attract lots of attention both in the press and the lab. Read any book in the field, and you're likely to come across a description of how geckos hold onto smooth surfaces, how the petals of lotus flowers clean themselves, and how shellfish are able to create shells that are remarkably durable. (Indeed, Peter Forbes puts the gecko front and center in his new book, The Gecko's Foot: Bio-inspiration: Engineering New Materials from Nature.)

 

Recently, as Nanowerk reports, scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam have made progress in understanding how seashells become so strong:

Nanocrystal engineering learned from biominerals holds promises for the development in biology, chemistry, and materials science. Biominerals have inspired novel bottom-up approaches to the development of functional materials for some time now. The morphology, crystallographic orientation, incorporated organic molecules, and emergent properties of carbonate-based biominerals already have been demonstrated. Typical examples of these biominerals are certain layers of seashells, corals, and eggshells. New research now clarifies that biominerals are oriented architectures of calcium carbonate nanocrystals 2