(via kottke)

collisiondetection.net reviews the article here: “Molecular secretes of the ‘iron plated snail’”

the original pnas pdf is here: “Protection Mechanisms of the iron-plated armor of a deep-sea hydrothermal vent gastropod”

my fave part of the paper is where they basically say, “evolution figured out a bunch of shit that can be useful for us,” but they put it more scholarly:

The design space for synthetic multilayered structural composites for protective applications is enormous, with a large number of potential design parameters… Hence, predicting the response of such systems is extremely complicated and requires accurate information… Much of this information is typically unknown… Biological systems, such as the one described here, greatly reduce the engineering design space since efficient threat-protection design concepts have emerged through the lengthy evolutionary process that fulfill the necessary functions and constraints.

Anyway, this is cool.