Nearly 4 billion years of evolution have allowed living creatures to create some pretty astonishing materials and structures. Take bone, for example, which is strong, flexible, and lightweight. Or the eye, exquisitely designed to detect even tiny numbers of photons.

Can we learn from nature and craft altogether new materials based on biological design principles?

Yes, especially if we are clever enough to attempt not to outdo, but to mimic nature.

Check out the recent work of a research group from Berkeley, who report on “bio-inspired hybrid materials” (Science, 5 December 2008, pp. 1516–1520). They are stimulated by nacre, the hard and resilient material that makes up the shell of mollusks. Also known as mother-of-pearl, nacre is an organic/inorganic composite, neither component of which has useful properties (at least to oysters) by itself.

Munch et al.combine two ordinary compounds (aluminum oxide and polymethyl methacrylate) into a hybrid structure 300 times tougher than either component alone. Tougher, stiffer, and stronger even than aluminum alloys.

How does it work? By freeze-casting multiple layers into a complex extended hierarchy, just like the formation of nacre.

So next time you are wandering on the beach, aimlessly picking up sea shells, why not see if you can come up with an idea as good as nature’s own.

Today happens to be Christmas, but ‘tis also the season for many other celebrations: Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, Ramadan, New Years, etc. So whatever your traditions or inclinations, I wish you all the best that life has to offer.

And if you want to see how to convey holiday greetings in practically every language you can think of, check out this site.

A few years back, at a professional meeting in New York City, I nearly fell from a 40th-floor balcony.

It wasn’t a cloddish, ungainly move on my part, but a reaction to eating an hors d’oeuvre chunk of chicken on a wooden stick. It happened to be dusted in a peanut paste, to which I am allergic, and the immediate reaction of nausea and dizziness is what almost sent me to my demise.

About 1% of people have a peanut allergy, and it is the most common cause of food-related deaths in the U.S. There have been many attempts to develop drugs to protect people from peanut allergy, but none has been successfully commercialized. There is even one infamous biotech attempt that bogged down in nasty legal disputes over discovery, priority, and ownership.

Luckily, molecular science has just offered new hope to all of us who fret over avoiding peanuts. A team of scientists from Georgia, Missouri, and Louisiana started with the reasonable assumption that silencing the gene responsible for the allergy could produce hypoallergenic peanuts (Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 56 [2008]: 11225–11233) .

Complications arise immediately when you learn that peanuts have 11 different genes that produce allergens. Simplifying the predicament, though, is the fact that 80-90% of human allergic reactions are caused by just two peanut proteins. Knock down the expression of these and you solve most of the problem.

RNA interference is the chemical weapon of choice. RNAi works by depressing expression of the selected gene through a well-understood pathway. In peanuts, targeting the two genes in question did effectively lower the production of their protein products, and it had the gratifying result of not raising the susceptibility of the plant to pests.

As to how good the biotech peanuts taste, I’ll never know. Too much lingering memory association with the taste of nuts, and almost falling 40 stories, to risk a repeat.

Working scientists obtain news of what is happening in their fields by reading primary journals and attending conferences. Most nonscientists likely get their science news from the media: print, television, radio, and Internet. And my hunch is that even scientists rely on the general media for science news outside their fields.

But what if the science media vanished? Such a disappearing act has already happened, at least at CNN, where the entire science reporting team was axed.

Many other news outlets have announced staff reductions recently, including NBC, Gannett newspapers, The Christian Science Monitor, the San Francisco Chronicle, United Press International, and Time. We don’t know how many of the casualties were science reporters, but one assumes they aren’t spared.

So what to make of the situation? It’s easy enough to spin dire consequences from loss of reliable information on the steady march of science.

On the other hand, trying to find an optimistic view, perhaps the slack in trained science journalists will be made up by other clever reporters. And since these reporters will have to work harder to get the story right, standards of accuracy and clarity may actually increase.

I lean toward the view of Carl Sagan, who wrote in his 1995 book The Demon Haunted World:

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time, when the United States is a service and information economy … when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical facilities in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media….

So if you want to save the world by doing science journalism, but still have to perform your day job, check out this site, which offers a free online course on the practicalities of the profession.