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.

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,
When you get a cut on your arm, blood will