Brazil-MRS Provides Mixture of Ethereal and Practical Topics in Materials Research
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Brazil-MRS Provides Mixture of Ethereal and Practical Topics in Materials Research The second meeting of the Brazilian Materials Research Society (SBPMat, where the “P” stands for pesquisa, or “research”), held in Rio de Janeiro on October 26–29, 2003, was remarkable in several ways. First, every scheduled speaker was present. That reflected a remarkably intensive planning process that was evident well into the meeting, as the meeting’s chair, SBPMat president Guillermo Solórzano (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro), managed to accommodate the personal and professional needs of almost every individual at the conference. Some of those needs—like my six-year-old child demanding a Halloween celebration even though Halloween is not a Brazilian tradition— were far off the beaten trail. But guess who received a basket of Brazilian candy on Halloween? Second, there was an intriguing mixture of ethereal and practical topics. On the ethereal side, I was fascinated by talks from researchers at Brazil’s Laboratório Nacional de Luz Síncrotron: I had not realized it was possible to follow the transfer of electrons from one orbital to another along the different atoms of a crystal structure as an atom alights upon a substrate. Gorgeous atomic force microscope pictures of gold substrates and remarkable focused ion-beam work locating and isolating incredibly tiny (
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