Squid Beak

Before he retired from the US Senate, Wisconsin’s William Proxmire made a point of handing out “Golden Fleece” awards to government funded research projects that seemed completely absurd in his view.  Here might be one of those projects the Senator would have held up to ridicule—a study of the nanomaterial structure of squid beaks.  But as it turns out the squid’s beak has some interesting properties due to its “network of chitin fibers embedded with increasingly cross-linked structural proteins from mouth to tip.”  In other words, one end is hard, and the other soft.  Synthesizing such a material would be useful for medical devices where body tissue and man-made materials interface, such as abdominal feeding tubes and prosthetic attachment points.              MORE

Image Credit: CaseWesternReserve