- #1
TheShermanTanker
- 13
- 4
I just wanted to ask something that's being bugging me for quite a while now, if you don't mind. In standard testing, Biological Materials often are found to have impressive strength characteristics, for example, both Type I Collagen, the supporting protein of muscle (And I think Skin as well), as well as medium sized bones, have strength characteristics that can rival that of several steels, barring the highest quality steel types and alloys, with bone only being defeated by extremely high quality Titanium Alloys. Yet bone can be broken rather easily in falls, as well as be cleanly sliced (Doesn't even provide some resistance which would have resulted in the bone fracturing open after repeated hacking attempts rather than instantly being cut in half in one clean slice straight through) by sharp implements like swords and cleavers and knives (This has been done in several competitions as well as in your kitchen of course), while Skin barely fares well against your kitchen knife and basically anything you use to cut food, and muscle provides basically no resistance to pure blunt compression forces or sharp forces at all (As a more gruesome example predators and even swarms of ants are always able to break open skin and flesh of dead animals and eat them, no matter how tough the creature seems to be). Given how science is often fascinated by how well biological materials perform strength wise, and many applications from mimicking the structure of said materials have been found, why do Biological Materials seem to perform so poorly in day to day circumstances when they have such impressive all round strength characteristics?