Discover the materials of the future...in 30 seconds or less | Dr. Taylor Sparks | TEDxSaltLakeCity

(Must refrain from making snarky comment about mustache...boots...slacks...)

Wait, the video is fifteen minutes long ( a pretty standard TED talk length, admittedly), but the title says "...in 30 seconds or less"). That feels like a serious disconnect.

I'm also a little disappointed that I don't know Dr Sparks because I've taught a material science camp at University of Utah (where he teaches) a half dozen times. I know a lot of the people on this page - but Dr Sparks seems to have eluded me for some reason.

In the above talk, Dr Sparks goes through the historical model of - as he says - "Edisonian trial and error" and serendipity (a la the discovery of saccharine) discovering new materials. He then transitions to our needs to discover modern materials in a more purposeful way via the Materials Genome Initiative and his research using machine learning to predict properties of materials either not yet created or with ingredients too rare to risk on trial and error experimentation. He refers to this field as materials informatics, a term I've never heard of before.

I think I'm going to hunt Dr Sparks down when I get out to Salt Lake (hopefully) next summer.

Why Things Fail: from tires to helicopter blades, everything breaks

I'm really digging on Wired magazine's materials science coverage of late. I don't know if they're intentionally adding more reportage of materials or if it's a coincidence. I'm happy either way.

This month's issue has an article on Ford's Building 4 testing complex in which they test automotive parts - gas pedal hinges, engines, even entire vehicles - to failure and try to develop a failure analysis curve to show how long they can expect to have a part survive under typical circumstances. The article also covers Vextec - a failure analysis company - and their efforts to computerize the failure testing process, developing a way to model materials on the computer, create thousands of virtual versions of the material, and test each of them to failure without making and destroying thousands of prototypes, something that aligns wonderfully with the Materials Genome Initiative.

Good stuff here, plus it's about cars...always cool.