Get the full paper here: Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 49, 6448 (2010).
Taking the heat: Hard/soft core/shell colloidal building blocks allow large-scale self-assembly to form nacre-mimetic paper. The strength and stiffness of this material can be tailored by supramolecular ionic bonds. These lightweight biomimetic materials show excellent and tunable mechanical properties and heat and fire-shielding capabilities.