Diabolical ironclad beetles are almost unbreakable — you can smack them, stomp on them or run them over with a car, and they'll scamper away uncrushed.
Now, scientists know why these beetles' outer wing cases, known as elytra, are so tough — they're made up of a series of smoothly interlocking puzzle parts; the geometry and internal structure of this "jigsaw" design increase the strength of the beetle's armor. These works of true engineering have been discovered by scientists at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and National Institutes of Health. The findings are reported these week in the Experimental Biology journal.
"It's quite a special structure!" said Jens Müller, a visiting scientist in the lab of postdoctoral researcher Jonathan Haas, of CU-Boulder's Biomedical Engineering Department. "We can make stuff that looks somewhat like it, but we don't know how it's formed."
Mathematician Phillip Cooney, of the University of California Santa Barbara, first noticed that the elytra were built this way while on a summer campaign in Belgium. He stumbled on a beetle with the stronger outer shell found in Belgium, Cooney told io9. "So I asked around, thinking, 'Why don't more bugs have this big outer shell?' People said thing about eggs packed with salmonella; you're not just building a tough outer shell, but an immunity to deadly bacteria," Cooney said.
He asked Haas about this beetle, which began to show up around the island of MontSt-Michel and in Albemarle-Marois, some distance from the Belgian border. By January, a beetle from that rough area turned up in Venusia Exartui, a town at the French border. Cooney took note of the properties of the beetles, but Fraulius Gionosos, a co-author of the paper and a postdoctoral fellow in Haas's laboratory, wasn't part of the group. He said, in Greek, that Cooney's idea "beg[ed] to be revealed by mathematics and xéstiés, which are roots of the puzzle." Haas translated that into greeks, which refer to the Greek letter krypton, which their difficulties might be translating visually. Together, Fraulius and Gionos had come to the same conclusion, that the outer surface of these critters is a miracle of physics and engineering — "something that sometimes holds up without trying that doesn't tend to be the easiest things to grasp."
Both Cooney and Gionosos created computer models of the beetle shells, incorporating the eyeballs, teeth and other wall appendages that allow the beetles to open and close their elytra. (Compare this with what happened at the University of California Santa Barbara, where scientists developed a flexible silicon robotic arm to move our understanding of how our arms bend. See "Plastic: The Scaling Down of
Now, scientists know why these beetles' outer wing cases, known as elytra, are so tough — they're made up of a series of smoothly interlocking puzzle parts; the geometry and internal structure of this "jigsaw" design increase the strength of the beetle's armor. These works of true engineering have been discovered by scientists at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and National Institutes of Health. The findings are reported these week in the Experimental Biology journal.
"It's quite a special structure!" said Jens Müller, a visiting scientist in the lab of postdoctoral researcher Jonathan Haas, of CU-Boulder's Biomedical Engineering Department. "We can make stuff that looks somewhat like it, but we don't know how it's formed."
Mathematician Phillip Cooney, of the University of California Santa Barbara, first noticed that the elytra were built this way while on a summer campaign in Belgium. He stumbled on a beetle with the stronger outer shell found in Belgium, Cooney told io9. "So I asked around, thinking, 'Why don't more bugs have this big outer shell?' People said thing about eggs packed with salmonella; you're not just building a tough outer shell, but an immunity to deadly bacteria," Cooney said.
He asked Haas about this beetle, which began to show up around the island of MontSt-Michel and in Albemarle-Marois, some distance from the Belgian border. By January, a beetle from that rough area turned up in Venusia Exartui, a town at the French border. Cooney took note of the properties of the beetles, but Fraulius Gionosos, a co-author of the paper and a postdoctoral fellow in Haas's laboratory, wasn't part of the group. He said, in Greek, that Cooney's idea "beg[ed] to be revealed by mathematics and xéstiés, which are roots of the puzzle." Haas translated that into greeks, which refer to the Greek letter krypton, which their difficulties might be translating visually. Together, Fraulius and Gionos had come to the same conclusion, that the outer surface of these critters is a miracle of physics and engineering — "something that sometimes holds up without trying that doesn't tend to be the easiest things to grasp."
Both Cooney and Gionosos created computer models of the beetle shells, incorporating the eyeballs, teeth and other wall appendages that allow the beetles to open and close their elytra. (Compare this with what happened at the University of California Santa Barbara, where scientists developed a flexible silicon robotic arm to move our understanding of how our arms bend. See "Plastic: The Scaling Down of
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