The discovery of ferroelecticity in mammalian tissue makes researchers wonder what its purpose is and what it may be useful for.
Ferroelectricity—a spontaneous electrical polarization—was first discovered in potassium sodium tartrate, a salt, in 1920. The effect is reminiscent of ferromagnetism. At first, hydrogen bonding was thought to be essential for this property, until the finding of the ferroelectric oxide
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two decades later. In 1974, ferroelectric liquid crystals were produced, following theoretical predictions based on intuitive symmetry arguments. Since then, intense scientific efforts have uncovered hundreds of ferroelectric materials in various forms, including submicron films, nanotubes, nanowires, integrated ferroelectrics, etc., many of which are neither hydrogen bonded nor oxides [1]. Now, writing in Physical Review Letters, Yuanming Liu and co-workers at the University of Washington in Seattle, with collaborators at Boston University, Massachusetts, demonstrate evidence of ferroelectricity in mammalian tissue [2].
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