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Squid Beak Both Hard And Soft, A Material That Engineers Want To Copy

Posted: 04 Apr 2008 07:10 AM CDT

How did nature make the squid’s beak super hard and sharp — allowing it, without harm to its soft body — to capture its prey?

The question has captivated those interested in creating new materials that mimic biological materials. The results are published in this week’s issue of the journal Science.

The sharp beak of the Humboldt squid is one of the hardest and stiffest organic materials known. Engineers, biologists, and marine scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have joined forces to discover how the soft, gelatinous squid can operate its knife-like beak without tearing itself to pieces.

UC Santa Barbara is a mecca for this type of interdisciplinary study, and draws scientists and engineers from all over the world to grapple with questions that cross a wide range of science and engineering disciplines.

The key to the squid beak lies in the gradations of stiffness. The tip is extremely stiff, yet the base is 100 times more compliant, allowing it to blend with surrounding tissue. However, this only works when the base of the beak is wet. After it dries out, the base becomes similarly stiff as the already desiccated beak tip.

Humboldt squids, or Dosidicus gigas, are about three feet wide and can injure a fish with one swift motion. According to the article, “a squid beak can sever the nerve cord to paralyze prey for later leisurely dining.”

“Squids can be aggressive, whimsical, suddenly mean, and they are always hungry,” said Herb Waite, co-author and professor of biology at UC Santa Barbara. “You wouldn’t want to be diving next to one. A dozen of them could eat you, or really hurt you a lot.” The creatures are very fast and swim by jet propulsion.

Besides humans, squid’s main predator is the sperm whale, and these animals frequently show the scars of battle, with skin marred by the squid’s sharp suckers. Waite noted that squid muscle is available in locally made sandwiches, often called “calamari steak sandwiches.”

Waite finds the squid beak compelling and he interested postdoctoral researcher and first author Ali Miserez in joining the study. Miserez is affiliated with UCSB’s Department of Materials, the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology (MCDB), and the Marine Science Institute.

“I’d always been skeptical of whether there is any real advantage to ‘functionally graded’ materials, but the squid beak turned me into a believer,” said co-author Frank Zok, professor and associate chair of the Department of Materials at UC Santa Barbara.

“Here you have a ‘cutting tool’ that’s extremely hard and stiff at its tip and is attached to a material — the muscular buccal mass — that has the consistency of Jell-o,” said Zok.

“You can imagine the problems you’d encounter if you attached a knife blade to a block of Jell-o and tried to use that blade for cutting. The blade would cut through the Jell-o at least as much as the targeted object. In the case of the squid beak, nature takes care of the problem by changing the beak composition progressively, rather than abruptly, so that its tip can pierce prey without harming the squid in the process. It’s a truly fascinating design!”

Zok explained that most engineered structures are made of combinations of very different materials such as ceramics, metals and plastics. Joining them together requires either some sort of mechanical attachment like a rivet, a nut and bolt, or an adhesive such as epoxy. But these approaches have limitations.

“If we could reproduce the property gradients that we find in squid beak, it would open new possibilities for joining materials,” explained Zok. “For example, if you graded an adhesive to make its properties match one material on one side and the other material on the other side, you could potentially form a much more robust bond,” he said. “This could really revolutionize the way engineers think about attaching materials together.”

According to Waite, the researchers were helped by the fact that squid seem to be moving north from areas where they have been traditionally concentrated, for example deep waters off the coast of Acapulco, Mexico. Recently however Humboldt squid have been found in numbers in Southern California waters. Dozens of dead squid have recently washed up on campus beaches, providing the researchers with more beaks to study.

[Gail Gallessich @ University of California — Santa Barbara]

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Increased Knowledge About Global Warming Leads To Apathy, Study Shows

Posted: 04 Apr 2008 05:12 AM CDT

The more you know the less you care — at least that seems to be the case with global warming. A telephone survey of 1,093 Americans by two Texas A&M University political scientists and a former colleague indicates that trend, as explained in their recent article in the peer-reviewed journal Risk Analysis.

“More informed respondents both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming,” states the article, titled “Personal Efficacy, the Information Environment, and Attitudes toward Global Warming and Climate Change in the USA.”

The study showed high levels of confidence in scientists among Americans led to a decreased sense of responsibility for global warming.

The diminished concern and sense of responsibility flies in the face of awareness campaigns about climate change, such as in the movies An Inconvenient Truth and Ice Age: The Meltdown and in the mainstream media’s escalating emphasis on the trend.

The research was conducted by Paul M. Kellstedt, a political science associate professor at Texas A&M; Arnold Vedlitz, Bob Bullock Chair in Government and Public Policy at Texas A&M’s George Bush School of Government and Public Service; and Sammy Zahran, formerly of Texas A&M and now an assistant professor of sociology at Colorado State University.

Kellstedt says the findings were a bit unexpected. The focus of the study, he says, was not to measure how informed or how uninformed Americans are about global warming, but to understand why some individuals who are more or less informed about it showed more or less concern.

“In that sense, we didn’t really have expectations about how aware or unaware people were of global warming,” he says.

But, he adds, “The findings that the more informed respondents were less concerned about global warming, and that they felt less personally responsible for it, did surprise us. We expected just the opposite.

“The findings, while rather modest in magnitude — there are other variables we measured which had much larger effects on concern for global warming — were statistically quite robust, which is to say that they continued to appear regardless of how we modeled the data.”

Measuring knowledge about global warming is a tricky business, Kellstedt adds.

“That’s true of many other things we would like to measure in surveys, of course, especially things that might embarrass people (like ignorance) or that they might feel social pressure to avoid revealing (like prejudice),” he says.

“There are no industry standards, so to speak, for measuring knowledge about global warming. We opted for this straightforward measure and realize that other measures might produce different results.”

Now, for better or worse, scientists have to deal with the public’s abundant confidence in them. “But it cannot be comforting to the researchers in the scientific community that the more trust people have in them as scientists, the less concerned they are about their findings,” the researchers conclude in their study.

[Kelli Levey @ Texas A&M University]

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Actor-Robots ‘Staff’ Part Of New $5M Simulation Training Center

Posted: 04 Apr 2008 03:13 AM CDT

A medical student places a chest tube in a patient lying on an operating table, while another student conducts a colonoscopy. Everything is just as it would be in a real OR or treatment room, except that the patients won’t be harmed or complain if mistakes are made — they’re robots.

These high-tech, electronically outfitted mannequins are equipment in the new $5 million medical and surgical simulation training center at the Johns Hopkins Outpatient Center in East Baltimore that opened in March.

The ’sim’ center contains two fully operational ORs, two intensive care units (ICUs), high-fidelity computerized mannequins that mimic physiologic and behavioral response to procedures, and 12 examination rooms where students practice routine exams on actors posing as patients with particular complaints and symptoms.

The mannequins have breath sounds and heart tones, palpable pulses, and a monitor that displays vital signs as students, physicians, nurses and other health care professionals practice everything from bag-mask ventilation, intubation, and defibrillation to chest tube placement and endoscopies. Computer programs test decision making skills and knowledge on topics such as advanced cardiac life support and trauma management.

“The idea is to get it right before they treat real patients,” says the center’s director, Elizabeth Hunt, M.D., M.P.H., assistant professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine.

The troupe of paid professional actors who are trained to portray patients submit themselves to trainees who practice taking histories, performing physical exams, breaking bad news and communicating in a compassionate manner.

“Students can learn the science of medicine in many different ways, but there is only one good way to learn good bedside manner, and that is with real people,” says Hunt.

Each of the 15 simulation rooms in the center is equipped with adjustable cameras, microphones, one-way glass for observer viewing, and large flat-screen monitors so students and staff can quickly review their performance while it’s still fresh in their minds.

In addition to training students and staff, Hunt says the center also will be used to train medical staff on new equipment, and for teaching emergency medical technicians and paramedics. Outside groups may also be welcome during continued medical education seminars.

[Eric Vohr @ Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions]

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Posted: 04 Apr 2008 02:27 AM CDT

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