Body armour to scale up by mimicking flexible fish

• Autores: Sara Reardon
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2901, 2013, pág. 21
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Polypterussenegalus, a tough beast whose strong bite and sturdy exoskeleton has kept its species going for 96 million years is featured. Each of the scales that cover its long body is made up of multiple layers; when the fish is bitten, each layer cracks in a different pattern so that the scale stays intact as a whole. This combination of flexibility and strength is perfect for human armour, says Swati Varshney of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, speaking at the Society, for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in San Francisco earlier this month. She and colleagues performed X-ray scans of scales, reconstructed the shapes and then worked out how they slotted together.