Scientists reveal the secrets behind ant teeth super strength

To keep consumer electronics shrinking in size, engineers need to build tiny yet tremendously strong instruments to use in the gadgets' construction. One group is hoping to get blueprints from mother nature by studying some of the teeniest, toughest tools we know of: ant teeth. 

Thinner than a strand of human hair, the insects' miniature chompers can bite down forcefully enough to cut through sturdy leaves without suffering any damage. It all has to do with the teeth's even arrangement of zinc atoms, which allow for equal distribution of force each time the creatures crunch on something. That feature, researchers say, can one day be applied to human-made tools.

"Having the uniform distribution, essentially, is the secret," said Arun Devaraj, a senior research scientist at the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and author of a study on the composition of ant teeth published Wednesday in the journal Scientific Reports. The ant chompers "can even cut human skin without breaking -- it's hard to even do that with our own teeth."

To get to the bottom of nature's secrets and meet humanity's need for pocket-size electronics -- so we can conveniently check our Twitter feeds, of course -- the study researchers first isolated a minuscule piece of a single ant tooth. Ants have two, or sometimes more, teeth on their curved external mandible, or jaw. Then, the team turned to a technique called atom probe tomography, which precisely paints a picture of where each atom within an object is located.

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