Wired has news of a very cool development in the materials world: artificial nacre. From the Wired article (Link):

A team of researchers in the Materials Science Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has managed to imitate the complex structures found in ice and mollusk shells, and the ultra-strong material could lead to everything from stronger artificial bone to airplane parts.

I keep surfing over to the RepRap blog and seeing devices that look more and more like regular old injection molding machines and can’t help but wonder if there isn’t something off in this approach. This kind of news just reinforces that feeling that there might be a better process.

Cool stuff.