Sea urchins provide clue to light materials
In the search for strong, lightweight
materials, researchers are looking to
sea urchins, which have spines made
of chalk, a generally brittle substance.
Ling Li
Assistant
Professor
Research
Focus:
Biological
structural
materials; Bio-
inspired materi-
als
The complex three-dimensional struc-
ture of sea urchin spines that is 70 to
80 percent porous creates a stable
and strong structure. Studying the sea
urchin is part of a $540,000 National
Science Foundation grant being inves-
tigated by Ling Li.
By using design rules gathered from
studying biological systems and input-
ting those rules into the design of bio-
inspired lightweight ceramic materials,
Li said he hopes the information can
be applied to creating lightweight pan-
els and other components.
Diseases spread by ‘sneezing’ plants
In an article published on the cover of the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Virginia Tech
researchers have found that wheat plants ‘sneezing’ off condensation can vastly impact the
spread of spore-borne diseases such as wheat leaf rust which can cause yield losses of up to
20 percent or more in the United States, and higher losses in less developed agricultural na-
tions.
The study is part of a three-year grant from the US Department of Agriculture’s National
Institute of Food and Agriculture to study the dispersal of wheat pathogens by rain splash and
jumping-droplet condensation. Jonathan Boreyko, assistant professor of mechanical engineer-
ing is a co-PI on the nearly $500,000 project.
“Conceptually, what the plants are doing is sneezing,” Boreyko said. “The jumping droplets, at
the rate of 100 or more an hour, are a violent expulsion of dew from the surface. It’s good for
the plant because it is removing spores from itself, but it’s bad because, like a human sneeze,
the liquid droplets are finding their way onto neighboring plants. Like a cold, it’s easy to see
how a single infected plant could propagate a disease across an entire crop.”
8 Revised and Corrected, Nov. 2019
Jonathan
Boreyko
Assistant
Professor
Research
Focus:
Interfacial fluid
mechanics;
Biomimetic
engineering;
Water and
energy harvest-
ing; Droplet
dynamics; Syn-
thetic trees