Friday, April 18, 2008

Pearls Without Swine

In the world of neat stuff for the tech geek, we have an entry from the folks at the University of Dayton Research Institute, who have developed a technique to apply layers of ceramics to metal in the same manner as an oyster creates a pearl.

While ceramic coatings are fairly common this is a room temperature normal atmospheric pressure process, and should be effective in reducing wear and corrosion.

It appears that this was driven by a better understanding of the lowly bivalve, which does not extract CaCO3 from seawater, but instead, "that oysters use blood cells to deposit crystals that form shell and pearl".

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