Selling the seashell solution

 

Seashells (and bones) have some structural similarities that can be useful for preventing and reducing damage from hard impacts. In this case, mimicry is a good thing.

Seashell-Inspired Materials Use Their Layers To Boost Impact Absorption

" “This work was born out of a discussion with my collaborator, Professor Sigmund, about how we already can achieve some very extreme behaviors, but there’s always a physical limit or upper bound that single materials can achieve, even with programming,” Zhang said. “That led us to consider what kind of engineering could enable some of the crazy material behaviors needed in real life. For example, extreme buckling behaviors could help dissipate energy for things like car bumpers.”

That is when the team turned their attention to biological materials with multiple layers serving a different purpose, and how they could fabricate a synthetic material and use internal, microscale programming and optimization to control its response to mechanical stress and strain.

“We landed on the idea to design multilayered materials with each layer being capable of exhibiting different properties and behaviors,” Zhang said."

You can read the science below.

Zhao Z, Kundu RD, Sigmund O, Zhang XS. Extreme nonlinearity by layered materials through inverse design. Sci Adv. 2025;11(20):eadr6925. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adr6925.

The structure of the seashell nacre is pretty, and also pretty amazing.