Once again modern-man, the sophisticated homo sapien sapiens that we are, we with all the hi-tech digital expertise are confounded by nature and what was more than 100,000,000 year ago. If it's not one reminder it's another. And that which was used for right purposes we want to develop into a military tool of course. I'm talking about the polypterus senegalus of course! Why sure!   :-)  

The polypterus senegalus is an African fish that have trolls the murky freshwater pools and has for nearly 100 million years. And our interest might be?

Body armor! Body armor?

If there is anything that we've heard about from Iraq over the past few years it has been how our vehicles in Iraq do not have enough body armor and how the protective vests that our men and women wear are ineffective. So, it's back to the future, back one hundred million years to find ths secrets.

The armor of the fish, Polypterus senegalus, is so effective because it is a composite of several materials lined up in a certain way, the engineers state in a their analysis detailed in the July 27 issue of the journal Nature Materials. "Such fundamental knowledge holds great potential for the development of improved biologically inspired structural materials," said lead MIT researcher Christine Ortiz, "for example soldier, first-responder and military vehicle armor applications."

With funding from the U.S. Army, the engineers measured the material properties of a single fish scale and its four layer materials, including bone and dentine (a major mineral in teeth). The different chemical properties of each material, the shape and thickness of each layer and the junctions between layers all contributed to the armor's strength.

"That doesn't surprise me that hundreds of millions of years of evolution would be a good starting point for what we need for this day and age," said Leo Smith, assistant curator of zoology at The Field Museum in Chicago, "The armor's been sort of fine-tuned during that time for different aspects."

What else did we once know that we've forgotten or has been taken away, lost over the millions of years?  Lost civilizations, lost knowledge of the universe, and lost knowledge of WHO WE ARE! May we return home, or at least begin the journey........back!