Material Strength
These sponges skeletons have amazing geometric configurations, which have been extensively studied for their stiffness, yield strength, and minimal crack propagation. An aluminum tube (aluminum and glass have similar elastic modulus) of equal length, effective thickness, and radius, but homogeneously distributed, has 1/100th the stiffness.
Read more about this topic: Venus' Flower Basket
Famous quotes containing the words material and/or strength:
“What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons—reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.”
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“Strength, strength alone, is honorable, the German nation clamors in its majesty. But since it is hard to muster strength so suddenly, they have to make do with boorishness.”
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