When materials engineer Angela Belcher submitted her first post-doctoral grant proposal in 1999, one professional reviewer declared it “insane.” Dr. Belcher wanted to engineer viruses to “grow” electronic circuits to make batteries. She got the idea while studying for her Ph.D at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she collected abalone shells on the beach. How, she wondered, did the mollusks make such a strong, lightweight case? Abalone are natural engineers. They use proteins to interlace crystals of calcium...

Source: Wall Street Journal May 18, 2019 04:01 UTC