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Materials science

Synthetic sea shell

Nature volume 423, pages 925–926 (2003)Cite this article

The mechanical properties of natural substances such as bone and shell are envied by those involved in the fabrication of materials. A 'bricks-and-mortar' structure, assembled layer by layer, is the key to making sea shells.

For a materials scientist, cross-sectional images of the complex microstructures of naturally occurring hard materials such as bones and sea shells are awe-inspiring. Over many millions of years, nature has devised schemes to combine seemingly incompatible building-blocks — 'soft' organic proteins and 'hard' inorganic particles of calcium carbonate — in a manner that produces composite materials with the unusual combination of high strength, hardness and toughness. Imagine, however, that you could build such a structure as a mason would, one layer at a time, from the bottom up. Writing in Nature Materials, Tang and colleagues1 explain how it can be done, using a molecular-level processing scheme known as layer-by-layer assembly2,3.

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Figure 1: The 'bricks-and-mortar' approach.

J. A. SUGAR/CORBIS

References

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  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue 13-5110, Cambridge, 02139, Massachusetts, USA

    Michael Rubner

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  1. Michael Rubner
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Correspondence to Michael Rubner.

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Rubner, M. Synthetic sea shell. Nature 423, 925–926 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/423925a

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