2005 MRS Spring Meeting Mixes the Aesthetics and Science of Materials Research
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MRS NEWS
2005 MRS Spring Meeting Mixes the Aesthetics and Science of Materials Research The 2005 Materials Research Society Spring Meeting presented new and developing areas of materials research as well as established popular topics. Held March 28–April 1 at the Moscone West Convention Center in San Francisco, Calif., the Meeting supplemented the outstanding technical sessions with motifs on art and science, funding and entrepreneurship, a record number of 12 tutorials, and awards. Meeting chairs Joanna Aizenberg (Bell Laboratories/ Lucent Technologies), Oliver Kraft (IMF II, Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe/IZBS, University of Karlsruhe), Neville Moody (Sandia National Laboratories), and Ramamoorthy Ramesh (University of California, Berkeley) classified the 33 technical symposia into six clusters, covering an expanse of materials issues including photonics, nanotechnology, synthesis and fabrication, modeling, biotechnology, and energy. The Meeting included five days of technical sessions and talks, poster sessions, the awards and plenary session, tutorials, special events, an exhibit, and other activities, with about 2800 papers presented in oral and poster sessions to nearly 3100 attendees.
Uncommon Collaborations Joined by Common Interests It is rare to find collaborations between scientists and artists, but Etienne Krähenbühl and Rolf Gotthard of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne have shown how fruitful such a collaboration can be. Eight years ago Krähenbühl, a sculptor, walked into the office of Gotthard, an electron microscopist, and asked if there was a metal that would change color with temperature. The answer was no, but Gotthard did know of something else that might interest a sculptor: a shape-memory alloy. Thus was launched a collaboration that has produced the remarkable works on display at Swissnex, the Swiss cultural center in downtown San Francisco. Krähenbühl and Gotthard held a reception at Swissnex following their talk at the MRS Spring Meeting as part of Symposium X, a lunchtime series of presentations for the technical nonspecialist. The most striking of the sculptures on display was “Temps Suspendu” (“Suspended Time”), an array of scores of iron cubes suspended from shape-metal-alloy
wires. The cubes were cut from compressed train rails, and cast fascinating shadows on the floor. Temperature fluctuations in the room drove contractions in the length of the wires as they returned to their unstretched, “remembered” shapes, and these contractions set the cube array swinging and jangling like so many bells. See more about the collaboration in the sidebar on Symposium X. Complementing this presentation, the Meeting held—for the first time—a “Science as Art” competition, open to all attendees. Advances in materials characterization approaches are providing unprecedented insight into materials structure and behavior. These approaches underpin all materials discoveries while providing images of a world not visible to the naked eye. While the images created are of great significance to the world o
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