he new material is inspired by nature. "My niche is biomimetics -- using nature's tricks to design bio-inspired polymers," Holten-Andersen explains. There are an amazing variety of "really funky" organisms in the oceans: "We've barely scratched the surface of trying to understand how they're put together, from a chemical and mechanical standpoint." Studying such natural materials, evolved over millions of years to adapt to challenging environmental conditions, "allows us as engineers to derive design principles" that can be applied to other kinds of materials, he adds.
Holten-Andersen's own research has involved examining a particular kind of chemical bond found in the threads used by mussels to anchor themselves to rocks. These bonds, known as metal-coordination bonds, also play an important role in many other biological functions, such as binding oxygen to hemoglobin in red blood cells.