Going nature one better
Nature has one very big advantage over any human research team: plenty of time. Billions of years, in fact. And over all that time, it has produced some truly amazing materials — using weak building blocks that human engineers have not yet figured out how to use for high-tech applications, and with many properties that humans have yet to find ways to duplicate.But now a number of researchers such as MIT professor Markus Buehler have begun to unravel these processes at a deep level, not just finding out how the materials behave but what the essential structural and chemical characteristics are that give them their unique properties. In the future, they hope to mimic those structures in ways that produce even better results.It all comes down to assembling complex structures from small, simple building blocks, Buehler explains. He likes to use a musical analogy: A symphony comprises many different instruments,...