In the world of metals, it has long been considered common knowledge that achieving both strength and ductility (the ability to stretch without breaking) at the same time is nearly impossible. When a ...

In these examples, a common strategy is the fusion of soft and hard elements (porous materials are considered an extreme case). Spider webs are such an example, with the web consisting of hard radial ...

There’s a method to modeling cracking in brittle materials. The strength of teeth is told on the scale of millimeters. Porcelain smiles are kind of like ceramics — except that while china plates ...