Workers expanding a highway in 2010 found fossils of 80 huge whales in desert sandstones in Chile, prompting questions of how they died and why they were so well preserved.

Harvard's Wyss Institute specializes in designing new materials and devices that mimic patterns found in living things. Their latest contribution was inspired by the versatile material found in insect cuticle, which is strong and flexible, yet remarkably lightweight.

In late 2010, news media were abuzz about a very distant planet that astronomers thought might be just right for life because it appeared to be orbiting in the "habitable zone" of its star.¹ Headlines referred to it as a Goldilocks planet, because it was possibly "not too hot and not too cold" for liquid water on its surface.

Chitin is a biological material found in the cuttlebones, or internal shells, of cuttlefish. It has a maximum shelf life of thousands of years, and yet researchers recently verified—using three separate techniques, multiple laboratories, and careful material handling—that samples of chitin from fossils had the same basic chemistry as modern chitin.

Cuttlefish are mollusks that look somewhat like squid. They have an internal, hard, supportive structure with soft organs around and inside it. This resilient "cuttlebone" is made of cleverly woven strands of a biochemical material called chitin and mixed with a hard biomineral called aragonite.