Structural ceramics have many uses--water filtration, shielding, armor--and they're created and engineered by some of the biggest brains in the world. However, sometimes mother nature can teach us that there's more under the sun than the innovations of man. Scientists at UC Berkeley have discovered that a snail called the scaly-foot gastropod, known for over a decade as inhabiting a hydrothermal vent field in the Indian Ocean, sports a shell that is amazingly resistant to extreme temperature, pressure, acidity, and physical impact. Sounds a lot like advanced technical ceramics, right?
Robert Ritchie, a scientist at UC Berkeley, says,
"If you look at the individual properties of the bits and pieces that go into making this shell, they’re not very impressive, but the overall thing is.”Scientists at MIT concluded by using nanoscale experiments and computer simulations that the snail's shell uses "mechanical property amplification," an attribute that allows for the shell to be hundreds of times harder than the sum of its parts. The gastropod's shell is thicker than most other species', and it uses iron sulfide in its material composition. Scientists' larger goal, of course, is to leverage the natural ingenuity of the scaly-foot gastropod's shell into practical applications: armor, helmets, heat shields, corrosive containment. Ritchie believes it will be a while until marketable products are made using the lessons learned from the snail, but his lab is already working on creating a ceramic material based on its properties. For more information, check out this Wired article about this durable little deep-sea snail.
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