(Donna Coveney, MIT) An image of an armored African fish.
Scientists and engineers are getting some wild ideas from the wild kingdomFuture armor could be fishy Soldiers on future battlefields may wear a coat of armor like the one that has encased an African fish, shown here, for nearly 100 million years. The U.S. Army funded engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to tease apart exactly how the multiple material layers of each scale are arranged to protect the ancient fish, Polypterus senegalus, from predators. They reported the results in the summer of 2008 and plan to transfer the design to structural materials such as armor.
