The animal and plant worlds have inspired scientists for ages, and scientists have long been interested in why certain organisms are resilient to impact. Think of a woodpecker’s skull and beak, the protective way a fish’s scales overlap, or the thick rind that keeps a falling fruit from breaking open. One superstar in this field is the queen conch shell, the kind you may have held to your ear to hear the ocean. The queen conch gets beat up by waves and predators, but the structure of the material that makes up its shell is remarkably strong. This is due to the structure of the shell, which features criss-crossed calcium carbonate layers laid out in different orientations and separated by softer proteins, explains MIT engineering professor Markus Buehler, whose lab designed a man-made replica of this structure that could be used in helmets and other protective armor and published the results in the journal Advanced Materials. In both the conch and the man-made version, the “grain” of the material alternates by 90 degrees, so that impact from any particular direction is unlikely to wend its way through.
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