Sorry folks, upon finding out the news about this research on body armory, I just can't help posting the photo of Jason Momoa here. Jason Momoa, famously known as "Khal Drogo" in the Game of Thrones Series, will be playing the lead role in the upcoming Aquaman Movie. And yes, the story is about fish scales as the inspiration of this new body armor design being developed by American and Israeli researchers being funded by the U.S. Army.

In a paper published at Softmatter.org, researches from Technion-Israeli Institute of Technologu, Columbia University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called "Flexibility and protection by design: imbricated hybrid microstructures of bio-inspired armor", the researchers write that the project is:

Inspired by the imbricated scale-tissue fl exible armor of elasmoid fish, we design hybrid stiff plate/soft matrix material architectures and reveal their ability to provide protection against penetration while preserving flexibility. Indentation and bending tests on bio-inspired 3D-printed prototype materials show that both protection and flexibility are highly tunable by geometrical parameters of the microstructure. We show that penetration resistance can be amplified by a factor of 40, while flexibility decreases in less than 5 times.

Scale-type armor is not exactly new as it is as old as armor technology itself with scale with the oldest mention of the type were written by the Chinese thousands of years ago, even the Romans had a certain type of scale armor which was also popular and sough after instead of using mail.

(Fish Scale)

The next phase in the research is testing the design with projectiles to find out how the armor design will be able to withstand high speed projectiles such as bullets. Since the armor is flexible, it can be adjusted in the joint areas to allow better movement for the wearer.

(Scale-type Armor. Source unknown)

There is still a long way to go with the design so for now many would still rely on Kevlar and Ballistic Plates for body armor. But if fish-scale armor works as promised, just imagine that soldiers will be like the warriors in days of yore, albeit with more high tech equipment and even more destructive and deadly weapons.