The famous spider silk, known for its incredible strength, has found a curious competitor; and is that a team of scientists from the School of Engineering of the University of Portsmouth (United Kingdom) has claimed to have discovered the hardest biological material on record: the teeth of the common limpet .
Spider silk has a tensile strength of 1.3 gigapascals , a circumstance that gave it the title of strongest natural material. However, following this new research published in The Journal of the Royal Society Interface , the record will have to be updated. The incredible pulling force of the limpet, which spends most of its life scraping with its small teeth the surface of rocks in shallow waters of the sea to search for food, has been found to be between 3 and 6.5 gigapascals , much more twice the resistance of the mythical spider silk.
These powerful teeth, as detailed in the study, are composed of a mixture of a material called goethite (which contains iron) and nanofibers within a protein matrix. Its secret is due to the mixture of strength + finesse and they make it as hard a material as those made by humans such as carbon fiber or Kevlar .
This discovery could serve to improve some artificial materials both in the automotive industry (in Formula 1 cars, for example), aviation, shipbuilding or in dentistry (for the creation of more resistant fillings).
