Scientific American Magazine

Progress in materials science and engineering stim ulates the growth of many sectors of the economy. New materials and processes meet the needs of existing industries and give birth to new technology

From vacuum tubes to transistors to integrated circuits and optical fibers, the dramatic rise in the power of systems that process and transmit information has depended on advances in materials science

US. goals for su bsonic, supersonic and hypersonic flight and for space exploration call for alloys and composites notable for strength, light weight and resistance to heat

The 40 million cars and trucks produced every year consume a huge quantity of material. Far more of it is now aluminum, plastic or high-strength steel; correspondingly less is ordinary steel or cast iron

The economic well-being of any modern society requires that energy be captured, converted from one form into another and consumed in myriad ways. Each step demands materials with special properties

New polymers, ceramics, glasses and composites are among the many materials now enabling medical engineers to design innovative, and increasingly biocompatible, replacements for damaged human tissues

The extraordinary diversity of todays advanced materials is based on better knowledge of how to attain novel structures displaying new properties that lead to improved performance

Soon semiconducting chips employed in high-speed logic operations will be imprinted with more than 100,000 transistors, and chips in a computer's memory will store up to 16 million bits of information

The advantages of transmitting light signals instead of electrical ones have led to ultrapure glass, semiconductor alloys only a few atoms thick and "nonlinear" materials that are now revolutionizing communications

With the aid of new processing techniques, metallurgists create and exploit irregularities in the metallic crystalline structure to make exceptionally strong alloys that resist heat and corrosion

These nonmetallic, nonpolymeric materials are hard, resist heat and chemicals and can be designed to have special electrical properties. Research Focuses on a major shortcoming: a tendency to crack easily

Polymers with unprecedented qualities are emerging from advances in synthesis and from processing methods based on new knowledge about the relations between structure and properties in polymers

Composition and internal architecture can be varied freely in these hybrid materials in order to match their performance to the most demanding structural roles