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.
Broomell hopes that engineers in the future could copy nature’s
technique of changing a material’s durability by adding metal.
But, he says, his research is in the early stages, so don’t
expect NASA to send up a spacecraft built with worm-inspired
materials in the near future. It’s not out of the question that
an organic material like th