Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The behavior of nanostructured materials/small-volume structures and biologi-cal/bio-implantable materials, so-called "nano" and "bio" materials, is currently much in vogue in materials science. One aspect of this field, which to date has received only limited attention, is their fracture and fatigue properties. In this paper, we examine two topics in this area, namely the premature fatigue failure of silicon-based micron-scale structures for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and the fracture properties of mineralized tissue, specifically human bone.