Nanoscale understanding of hair could lead to new body armour

This is the claim of researchers from the University of California San Diego, who said hair has a strength to weight ratio comparable to steel and can be stretched up to one and a half times its original length before breaking.

"We wanted to understand the mechanism behind this extraordinary property," said Yang Yu, a nanoengineering Ph.D. student at UC San Diego and the first author of the study.

"Nature creates a variety of interesting materials and architectures in very ingenious ways. We're interested in understanding the correlation between the structure and the properties of biological materials to develop synthetic materials and designs - based on nature - that have better performance than existing ones," added Marc Meyers, a professor of mechanical engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and the lead author of the study.

In a study published online in Materials Science and Engineering C, researchers conducted a nanoscale investigation into how a strand of human hair behaves when it is deformed or stretched. The team found that hair behaves differently depending on how fast or slow it is stretched. The faster hair is stretched, the stronger it is.