Blogs / Discoblog

Aircraft designers are always on the lookout for tough but lightweight materials. Chris Broomell of the University of California, Santa Barbara may have found a new candidate—on the head of a worm.

The ragworm, sometimes called the sandworm (but not to be confused with the hideous but fictional creatures from Dune), boasts two ultra-tough pincers that it uses to burrow into ocean sediment. At 90 percent protein, you’d expect the worm’s mouth-parts to be tough, Broomell told New Scientist, but they have an additional secret—they’re fortified with zinc. The metal bonds those proteins together, and the result is three times stronger than the polymers humans can currently create.

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Like a lot of physics ideas based in quantum mechanics, the magnetic fields produced by superconductors are difficult to picture in your mind. But if you want an illustration, scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy say, look in your coffee cup.

Superconductivity means that a metal offers no resistance to electricity, having expelled its magnetic field. Only some metals, like lead and aluminum, have this property, and only at extremely cold temperatures—lead must drop below a critical temperature of about 7 degrees Kelvin. But when scientists at the DOE’s Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University looked at the arrangement of superconducting lead’s magnetic domains—the groups of atoms with a preferred magnetic direction—they saw a pattern: The picture looked an awful lot like bubbles in the frothed milk on top of a cup of cappuccino.

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When you get a cut on your arm, blood will clot around it to stop
the bleeding. British engineers have borrowed that natural defense and adapted it for another purpose – fixing planes while they’re still in the air.

Airplanes get little cracks or holes not only from impacts, like an unfriendly meeting with a stone or a bird, but also from simple wear and tear. Many are too small for the naked eye to see. So a team led by Ian Bond at Bristol University in the U.K. mimicked the way human bodies protect themselves in an attempt to create a self-healing plane.

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