New battlefield fashion trend: mother-of-pearl

Mother nature has a knack for surprising us with little things that we engineers have never thought of before. In this case it seems she's come up with a real beauty!
Nacre, also known as "mother of pearl," is teaching us a few things about material science. It appears that this material is much tougher than it looks. So tough, in fact, that it may actually be useful for the manufacture of light weight, high strength armor.

Now who would have thought that something like this could be useful in bullet-proof vests!