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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

Will our future sustainable cities grow like coral reefs, using bone [phys.org]?

Like bone, eggshell is a composite material, but it is around 95% mineral and only 5% hydrated protein. Yet even that small amount of protein is enough to make eggshell very tough, considering its thinness – as most breakfast cooks will have noticed. The next challenge is to turn this knowledge into something solid.

There are two ways to mimic natural materials. Either you can mimic the composition of the material itself, or you can copy the process by which the material was made. Since natural materials are made by living creatures, there are no high temperatures involved in either of these methods. As such, biomimetic materials – let's call them "neo-bone" and "neo-eggshell" – take much less energy to produce than steel or concrete.

In the laboratory, we have succeeded in making centimetre-scale samples of neo-bone. We do this by preparing different solutions of protein with the components that make bone mineral. A composite neo-bone material is then deposited from these solutions in a biomimetic manner at body temperature. There is no reason that this process – or an improved, faster version of it – couldn't be scaled up to an industrial level.

Of course, steel and concrete are everywhere, so the way we design and construct buildings is optimised for these materials. To begin using biomimetic materials on a large scale, we'd need to completely rethink our building codes and standards for construction materials. But then, if we want to build future cities in a sustainable way, perhaps a major rethink is exactly what's needed. The science is still in its infancy, but that doesn't mean we can't dream big about the future.

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