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The Squid's Beak May Revolutionize Engineering
Ace905 writes "For years the razor-sharp beak that squid use to eat their prey has posed a puzzle to scientists. Squid are soft and fragile, but have a beak as dense as rock and sharp enough to break through hard shells. Scientists have long wondered why the beak doesn't injure the squid itself as is uses it. New research has just been published in the the journal Science that explains the phenomenon. One of the researchers described the squid beak as 'like placing an X-Acto blade in a block of fairly firm Jell-O and then trying to use it to chop celery.' Careful examination shows that the beak is formed in a gradient of density, becoming harder towards the tip end. Understanding how to make such hardness gradients could revolutionize engineering anywhere that 'interfaces between soft and hard materials [are required].' One of the first applications researchers envision is prosthetic limbs."
Puffer fish also have a shell-crushing beak attached to a relatively soft base, but they have the advantage of a jaw bone(thought they lack skeletal structures like ribs) to propel it. It still always amazed me how they managed to have such soft lips and skin and yet chew apart snails and other hard shelled foods so fast.
A front page article with no comments? Really? ...are you all having sex or something?
hookers and grits.
What is going on? Squid are awesome and this is an interesting discovery... two comments?
Realistically I don't know if this is so "revolutionary", though - it's great for the squid, sure, but the revolutionary part will be figuring out how to actually engineer stuff like this.
It sounds simple and obvious enough, but thinking about how to create materials that behave like this one realizes the challenges involved (not that I am a materials engineer and know anything about it.)
"Frank Zok, professor and associate chair of the department of materials, said he had always been skeptical of whether there is any real advantage to materials that change their properties gradually from one part to another..."
Hmmm, maybe like a sword blade FFS!
Now if only they can figure out why the "lobster sticks to magnet!" and LOBSTER HAS A BEAK! (if you dunno what that's from, don't hate. Trust me, it's funny)
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Basically the article says something about a hardness gradient across the material is why the beak doesn't damage the squid itself. Then they say something about how this idea can be applied to manmade materials. Even that idea isn't entirely new anyways among manmade materials. The traditional samurai sword is forged in such a way that the edge is tempered and hardened to hold razor sharpness, yet the bulk of the blade is not hardened so that it doesn't shatter upon impact.
Most people probably know squid best as fried calamari - the tasty starters popular in many restaurants. But the researchers noted that these are animals that deserve respect.
When cooked properly they do.
are they going to Patent this?
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
All this from evolution. Who would have though it was smarter than us?
The government can't save you.
All this from intelligent design. Who would have thought that after the FSM took all that trouble to design an animal with all of these noodly appendages, we focus on the damn thing's beak?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Harder P3nis with new Squid tech.!!
Meta will eat itself
In the sword you have Wootz with a whole lot of really small hard metal carbides making it strong and you have soft Ferrite making it tough. Think of Tungsten Carbide and Silicon Carbide - the other metal carbides are almost as hard. Get it too hot for too long, the carbides break down and you lose the strength and may as well not have bothered to pattern weld in the first place.
It's really simple - layers of soft stuff and hard stuff. The layers are just very thin and there are a lot of them. It's used as an example in introductory materials science classes because it is a simple and dramatic example of a composite material and such a brilliant solution to the problem of making something out of two completly unsuitable materials.
What is describe above might be what you would use with a more conventional steel blade that has a single core material and has not been pattern welded. This is known as case hardening or carburising and in some modern material Boron is also used instead of Carbon to get increased hardness. This is done at a relatively high temperature (600C+) for many hours at a time. It gives you something stronger because the Carbon (or Boron) pushes it's way into the cubic crystal structure and forces it out of shape - to break the material you also have to fight against the extra force caused by the crystal structure being distorted. It's only on the surface because it has to diffuse through the crystal structure and that takes energy (temperature) and time. Get it too hot to try to save times and you have a completely different crystal structure and it's going to change into something else before room temperature and undo some of that hardening.
"The best thing since the Squid's Beak!"
Using B to get from A to C is an engineering revolution?
How the hell did we ever get into space?
I wonder if these type of gradient based material could be used for artificial teeth. Today teeth implants are embedded into the jaw bones, but many times the bone thickness is not enough. If instead gum-hardness material could be interfacing the gum, yet be hard on the surface it could be a very good replacement for bridges.
Does their beak work on the same principle? Does a ce-beaked squid grow it back like a missing fingernail?
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
This would seem to have general application. Fillings break away from teeth, taking part of the tooth with them, due to the strong bond and lack of gradation in hardness between filling and tooth. Blue LEDs were burning out at the junction until material scientists could develop a gradation of doping, spreading the load of charge across the the junction. Perhaps we could make more durable things (even abstract things) through applying a theory of gradation. I'm not an engineer though, maybe this is already common knowledge. Or maybe it's a badly investigated set of assumptions.