Mollusks maintain the symmetry of their pearls by adjusting the thickness of each layer of shimmering nacre. If one layer of the pearl’s nacre is thinner, the next layer is thicker and will balance ...

Pearls are the clever retaliation of oyster to invaders, where mantle tissue encases parasites or debris with iridescent nacre crystals of calcium carbonate in the conchiolin matrix to produce ...

The mystery of how pearls form into the most perfectly spherical large objects in nature may have an unlikely explanation, scientists are proposing in a new study. It appears in ACS' journal Langmuir, ...