The lightweight skeletons of organisms such as sea sponges display a strength   
   that far exceeds that of manmade products constructed from similar materials.   
   Scientists have long suspected that the difference has to do with the   
   hierarchical architecture of    
   the biological materials—the way the silica-based skeletons are built up from   
   different structural elements, some of which are measured on the scale of   
   billionths of meters, or nanometers. Now engineers at the California Institute   
   of Technology (Caltech)    
   have mimicked such a structure by creating nanostructured, hollow ceramic   
   scaffolds, and have found that the small building blocks, or unit cells, do   
   indeed display remarkable strength and resistance to failure despite being   
   more than 85 percent air.    
      
   "Inspired, in part, by hard biological materials and by earlier work by Toby   
   Schaedler and a team from HRL Laboratories, Caltech, and UC Irvine on the   
   fabrication of extremely lightweight microtrusses, we designed architectures   
   with building blocks that    
   are less than five microns long, meaning that they are not resolvable by the   
   human eye," says Julia R. Greer, professor of materials science and mechanics   
   at Caltech. "Constructing these architectures out of materials with nanometer   
   dimensions has    
   enabled us to decouple the materials' strength from their density and to   
   fabricate so-called structural metamaterials which are very stiff yet   
   extremely lightweight."   
      
    Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-09-made-to-order-materi   
   ls-focus-nano-strong.html   
      
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