“When we first saw the structure, we were really amazed.”
“When we first saw the structure, we were really amazed,” says Ling Li, a materials scientist at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. It looks like it’s been 3-D printed, he says.
Li and colleagues used an electron microscope to zoom in on ossicles from several dozen dead knobby starfish. At a scale of 50 micrometers, about half the width of a human hair, the seemingly featureless body of each ossicle gives way to a meshlike pattern that mirrors how carbon atoms are arranged in a diamond.
Zooming in on the bumpy growths called ossicles that make up a knobby starfish’s skeleton reveals a meshlike structure similar to the arrangement of carbon atoms in diamond. This arrangement strengthens the ossicles, which are mostly made of calcite, a relatively weak mineral.But the diamondlike lattice alone doesn’t fully explain how the ossicles stay strong.
Within that lattice, the atoms that make up the calcite have their own pattern, which resembles a series of stacked hexagons. That pattern affects the strength of the calcite too. In general, a mineral’s strength isn’t uniform in all directions. So pushing on calcite in some directions is more likely to break it than force from other directions.
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