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| | | Quentin Cooper reports on developments across the sciences. Each week scientists describe their work, conveying the excitement they feel for their research projects.
material.world@bbc.co.uk | | | | | LISTEN AGAIN 30 min | | | |
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"For me science isn't a subject, it's a perspective. There are fascinating scientific aspects to everything from ancient history to the latest gadgets, outer space to interior decorating; and each week on The Material World we try to reflect the excitement, ideas, uncertainties, collisions and collaborations as science continues its never-ending voyage into the unknown".
Quentin Cooper |
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BIOGRAPHY
INTERVIEW |
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|  | | The Titanic Sinking
after hitting an iceberg |
Why Things Break
Why and how things break can tell us a lot about how materials such as alloys behave and how they are made.
There are many examples where the failure of materials has had catastrophic effects. The Titanic sinking was one of them. The luxury ocean liner went down, in large part, because the iron used in the ship's hull had been made brittle by sulphur, allowing the iceberg to rip through it easily. Today metallurgists have to be able to develop materials with the exact properties needed to avoid another such disaster - think of the Challenger or of an airplane breaking up in flight because a tiny crack was exacerbated by increasing and decreasing air pressure.
Why does adding carbon to iron make the resulting metal, steel, stronger, whereas adding sulphur makes it more brittle and liable to break?
Professor Mark Eberhart, at the Colorado School of Mines, has been studying the chemistry of metals and other materials to answer these and similar questions.
Scientists still have much to learn about how planes of atoms slide over one another when a substance bends, or why impurities can toughen an alloy. In the past, scientists and manufacturers designed new products on a wing and a prayer, hoping that they wouldn't break. Now computers are being used to test new materials even before they're made.
Professor Dimitri Vvedensky, a physicist at Imperial College, has been helping to model how materials fail, using computer models. This powerful tool can show how the bonds between the individual atoms behave under certain stresses - even creating virtual experimental alloys to test before they're developed in real life.
Blue Skies Research
How do the people who fund science recognise a future Einstein, Crick or Watson? Where funding is limited, how do they decide where it should go to achieve truly innovative research results? No one wants to waste money on ridiculous research, but does our present system of peer review tend to support research which underpins established ideas, at the expense of the truly original?
Professor Colin Blakemore is the newly appointed Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council. He received MRC grants for many years for his research into vision and the early development of the brain. He know has the difficult job of having to spread a limited amount of funds between thousands of clamouring scientists.
Professor Don Braben began his career as a researcher in high-energy physics, but in 1980 he set up and led a new research initiative for BP - the Venture Research Unit. The initiative was very successful and, though it was never directed to specific goals, made ten times its expenditure in licensed technologies. However, he has not found funding to repeat the idea. He is now a visiting professor at University College London. They both believe in the need for fundamental research, but who should decide where the money goes?
Next month: We are recording a special programme in which you can put your questions directly to Quentin Cooper and a panel of experts.
If you'd like to ask a question, you can do so by sending an email to material.world@bbc.co.uk If you'd like to ask your question in person, please include a daytime telephone number. | | |
RELATED LINKS
BBCi Science
Don Braben's Blue Skies research web site
MRC 'Meet Colin Blakemore' site
BBC's Today Programme reports on science funding
Mark Eberhart's web site
Dimitri Vvedensky's web site
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites
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