Chinese scientists have developed a new kind of “living cement” that could, in theory, be used to build structures on far-away planets like Mars. According to reports, it works using just a few ingredients, including “domestic” soil/regolith, gelatin, and genetically engineered yeast.

If able to scale, this technique could be used to build shelters and other structures for future long-term human missions to the planet. What’s more, the process is relatively cheap and could be combined with on-site 3D printers.

The researchers managed to engineer a special strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast that produces extremely adhesive proteins. One of these proteins is similar to those produced by mussels that enable them to stick to surfaces like rocks.

The idea is that these proteins could be used as a kind of cement to bind soil or regolith, effectively making a kind of biological cement. The yeast cells therefore behave a bit like millions of microscopic sticky particles inside the binder.

Building Martian structures using yeast

The gelatin component forms a hydrogel around everything, while the soil/regolith provides the bulk of the material. Initially gloopy in texture, this paste can be extruded through 3D-printer nozzles to form complex structures.

As for “curing” the mixture, the researchers believe it is best to work with the conditions on Mars rather than fight them. Mars has a very thin atmosphere (about 0.6 percent of that on Earth) and is much colder on average than Earth (about -63.4°F/−53°C).

Under these conditions, liquid water will freeze and sublimate, meaning it never really stays in liquid form for very long. That is essentially freeze-drying. What’s left behind is a lightweight porous network in which the gelatin, yeast-derived adhesive proteins, and mineral grains are locked together.

You can liken that to something akin to a mixture of freeze-dried sponge and concrete. What’s more, this new material is actually pretty strong, with 12 MPa compressive strength and 6 MPa flexural strength.

That’s about on par with low-strength and lightweight concrete here on Earth. Promising indeed, and if it can save shipping thousands of tons of material for construction, that would clearly be enormously beneficial.

Instead, in theory, you’d just need to send the biological starter material, some processing equipment, and a big robot printer. Interestingly, the material is also recyclable, meaning its constituent parts can be broken down and reused.

All well and good, but before this could be seriously considered for applications outside the lab, some important things need to be refined.

More work to do

The first is that the tested material used sand as a substitute for Martian regolith. Actual Martian regolith has different particle characteristics and contains things such as perchlorates. How the gelatin-yeast mix reacts to this is yet to be tested.

Another issue is that the gelatin is porcine, meaning that it would need to be “shipped in” to a building site. The team also tested a gelatin-free formulation, although its performance was lower, and the researchers say stronger fully biological binders will be needed.

Yet another major issue is enabling the material to build pressurized structures to protect people from Mars’s harsh environment. The team proposes a ready-made pressure-retaining membrane enveloped by a shell and shielding built using this new living concrete.

Overall, it is a promising proof-of-concept showing that Martian regolith might one day be turned into printable construction material using engineered biology, while exploiting Mars’s cold and near-vacuum conditions as part of the manufacturing process rather than treating them purely as obstacles.

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Leaving VMware forces a fresh look at every layer of the datacenter, and data protection belongs near the top of that list. Most teams plan to move the backup design across as it stands and rebuild it on the new hypervisor. The better plan uses the exit to raise resiliency and recovery speed, keeps the backup application, and gives each layer the work it does best. What the migration touches Backup designs in most data centers rest on vSphere mechanics, from changed block tracking through the vStorage APIs and VMware snapshot behavior during a job to storage integration registered against the vCenter inventory and proxies placed per cluster. Many shops add an orchestration product such as Site Recovery Manager to drive the failover plan. Change the hypervisor and each of those assumptions gets a second look. Backup vendors have done real work here, and support for the major KVM-based platforms has matured quickly over the past year. The bigger question sits upstream of the backup application. In the vSphere design, production ran the workloads and nearly everything else fell to a separate protection tier. Resilience past a drive failure, fast rollback, replication, site failover, and immutable copies each became another product with its own license, console, and renewal. Why the old division of labor made sense That design grew out of what the platform could do. Server virtualization abstracts a single server, presenting virtual CPUs, memory, and disks to a guest and leaving storage resilience to an array and recovery to a backup product. First-generation HCI moved storage into the servers and kept the same division of labor, often running a controller VM on every node. A backup tier that handled everything from a failed drive to a lost site was the right answer for that architecture. The cost of that arrangement shows up on the worst day. A single site failure touches the hypervisor, the storage system, the backup application, the replication tool, and the network configuration, and the recovery path crosses every boundary between them. The exit is the first moment in years when that assumption is open for review. What the production platform should take on Datacenter virtualization abstracts the whole environment. Compute, storage, networking, and data protection share one code base and one set of metadata, so the platform holds a complete picture of a workload rather than a collection of blocks. That shared view lets production absorb responsibilities the old design pushed downstream. Far fewer events reach the backup tier once production handles them. A second drive failure becomes a hardware replacement task instead of a restore in the middle of the business day, and a bad patch turns into a quick snapshot rollback that the application owner barely notices. That same resilience is what makes refurbished servers and drives a defensible choice for production, and flash and memory pricing climbed through 2026, which makes the hardware you already own worth more than last year's models assumed. Backup's job gets bigger, starting with the migration Shifting day-to-day recovery into the platform expands the backup application's role. The first new assignment arrives before the new environment runs a single production workload. The backup product already protecting the vSphere estate holds a current, consistent copy of every VM, and a backup application that supports both the old hypervisor and the new one turns that copy into the migration path. Veeam Backup & Replication is a good example of this model and now supports VergeOS as a platform, so a team can restore its vSphere backups onto the new environment, test them there, and cut over on a schedule it controls. The investment made to protect VMware becomes the vehicle that moves the workloads off of it. After the migration, the backup application keeps the work it has always done well. Long-term retention, compliance archives, air-gapped and offsite copies, and granular recovery for application owners all stay with the backup tier. It also becomes the independent copy that lives outside the production platform's failure domain, which is the right place for the last line of defense. Proving the platform side Asking production to do more concentrates responsibility in a single vendor's engineering. That trade is defensible, and it is only defensible against evidence. Ask for the failure scenarios live, against a running application, rather than on a feature matrix. Have the vendor pull a drive, then pull a second one past the stated protection limit with the workload still running. Ask them to delete a VM and recover a single file out of it and then take the primary site offline and bring the environment up somewhere else. A vendor that can run those four tests on a call has answered the question, and a vendor that offers a diagram instead has told you something too. Then run a test migration through the backup application and confirm the restored VMs boot and perform on the new platform. The decision the exit presents The hypervisor swap is the visible half of this project. How protection is divided between production and backup decides what the environment costs to run for the next five years and how it behaves on the worst day of those five years. Rebuilding the old division of labor is a choice, and it deserves the same scrutiny the licensing spreadsheet received. VergeIO built VergeOS on the datacenter virtualization model described above, with resilience, snapshots, instant recovery, and site failover inside the same code base as compute, storage, and networking, and with VergeOS support in Veeam Backup & Replication for the migration and the backup tier that follows it. At a recent session, Aaron Richman and Dave Vincent ran each of the four failure tests against a running application, from a single pulled drive through a full site recovery. The session is available on demand. Take a look, and see how you can turn a big exit into a bigger opportunity. George Crump is Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO. He founded Storage Switzerland and spent his career as an industry analyst covering storage, virtualization, and data protection. Supplied by VergeIO