Piranha-Proof Fish Gives
Inspiration for Body Armor
Deep in the Amazon lives one of the world's largest freshwater fish: the legendary Arapaima. It tips the scales at hundreds of pounds... making it a coveted catch for extreme anglers, like Jeremy Wade from the show River Monsters. (River Monsters audio) After a dramatically scored struggle, he catches one. It takes two guys to hold it up! ("There it is, look at that for a fish! Look at that massive female Arapaima, about 150 pounds.")
亞馬遜深處生活著世界上最大的淡水魚之一：傳奇的巨滑舌魚。它重達數百磅，是極限垂釣者夢寐以求的垂釣對象，比如電視劇《河怪》中的傑裡米·韋德。經過激烈的鬥爭，他抓住了一條巨滑舌魚。兩個人才能將它舉起!（「就是它，看那條魚!」看看那隻巨大的雌性巨滑舌魚，大約150磅重。」）
Speaking of scales, this giant fish has another superlative quality: "It has these very impressive armored scales on its body which prevent penetration by predator's teeth yet still makes the fish quite flexible and nimble in the water." Robert Ritchie, a materials scientist at UC Berkeley. The predators he's talking about are piranhas. But the mighty Arapaima has them beat with its scales - one of the "toughest flexible biological materials," according to Ritchie's team.
說到體型，這種巨型魚還有另一個最出色的特點:「它身上有非常令人印象深刻的裝甲鱗片，這些鱗片可以抵擋捕食者的撕咬，而且使其在水中非常靈活和敏捷。」加州大學伯克利分校的一位材料科學家羅伯特·裡奇表示。他說的捕食者是食人魚。但是強大的巨滑舌魚用體型擊敗了它們——根據裡奇團隊的說法，這是「最堅韌的柔性生物材料」之一。
After subjecting the scales to stress tests and electron microscopy in the lab, they figured out the scales' secrets. For one, they have a hard, mineralized layer on the outside. "You need the hard layer at the surface to prevent the thing from penetrating. But if the whole scale was made of this hard layer, it would just shatter, like if you tried to penetrate a piece of glass."
在實驗室對這些鱗片進行了壓力測試和電子顯微鏡檢查後，他們發現了鱗片的秘密。首先，鱗片表面有一層堅硬的礦化層。「表面的硬層用於防止穿透。但如果整個鱗片都是由這層硬物構成的，它就會破碎，就像你試圖穿透一塊玻璃一樣。」
And so the scale then has a layer of softer, but tougher, collagen on the inside... more resistant to cracking in a piranha's bite. Materials scientists have already figured out this trick - to build materials with a hard layer on the outside and a tough layer on the inside - but the secret of the Arapaima scales is how exquisitely they transition from the hard to the tough.
因此，鱗片內部有一層更柔軟、更堅韌的膠原蛋白.更能抵抗食人魚的撕咬。材料科學家們已經發現了這個竅門——製造出外面有一層硬殼，裡面有一層韌性的材料——但是巨滑舌魚鱗片的秘密在於它們如何精巧地從硬殼過渡到韌殼。
We would love to do that in synthetic materials, it's just very hard to make materials like that. Maybe 3D printing in the future can do this. Nature does this rather cleverly because it builds materials from the bottom up, from the atoms and molecules up to the macro scale.
「我們想通過合成材料達到這一點，但是很難製造出這樣的材料。也許未來的3D列印可以做到這一點。大自然非常聰明地做到了這一點，因為它自下而上地建造材料，從原子和分子一直到宏觀維度。」
Photos and details are in the journal Matter.
So, who cares about a fish's scales? Well, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research does... they funded the study. Because Kevlar and other body armors are incredibly heavy. And this piranha-proof fish could be the key to a lighter load.
那麼，誰在乎魚鱗呢？空軍科學研究辦公室在乎，他們資助了這項研究.原因是凱夫拉爾和其他防彈衣非常重，而這種不受食人魚侵害的魚可能是減輕負重的關鍵。