Aluminum may seem like a common metal today, but did you know it was once considered on par with silver? Taylor and Andrew sit down with Marat Latypov, a professor at the University of Arizona, to explore how aluminum went from a precious metal to one of the go-to metals of modern society. We talk about the discovery that collapsed the price from dollars to cents per pound and the patent dispute it caused. We explore how a metal so hungry for oxygen resists corrosion so well and how precipitation hardening was discovered after a weekend getaway. Finally, we look at more recent issues like the challenges of Ford's aluminum F-150, the fire hazards of 1970s aluminum house wiring, and why recycling scrap is harder than it sounds.

How Aluminum Foil is made [LINK]

The Materialism Podcast is sponsored by Materials Today, an Elsevier community dedicated to the creation and sharing of materials science knowledge and experience through their peer-reviewed journals, academic conferences, educational webinars, and more. [LINK]

Thanks to Kolobyte and Alphabot for letting us use their music in the show!

If you have questions or feedback please send us emails at materialism.podcast@gmail.com or connect with us on social media: Instagram, Twitter.

Materialism Team: Taylor Sparks, Andrew Falkowski, & Jared Duffy.

We have all seen the heat of atmospheric reentry depicted a thousand times in movies and TV shows, but how do we actually protect spacecraft from that danger? Taylor and Andrew sit down with Nate Olson, an aerospace engineer at NASA's Johnson Space Center, to explore the history of thermal protection systems. Nate unpacks the science of surviving atmospheric entry from the simple blunt-body design that made reentry physically possible, to the ~300,000 honeycomb cells hand-caulked with Avcoat on Apollo. We also touch on modern events like the Artemis I heat-shield anomaly and where he believes the technology could be headed.

This episode was sponsored by Expert Lab Services. Learn more about their services on their website [LINK]

The Materialism Podcast is sponsored by Materials Today, an Elsevier community dedicated to the creation and sharing of materials science knowledge and experience through their peer-reviewed journals, academic conferences, educational webinars, and more. [LINK]

Thanks to Kolobyte and Alphabot for letting us use their music in the show!

If you have questions or feedback please send us emails at materialism.podcast@gmail.com or connect with us on social media: Instagram, Twitter.

Materialism Team: Taylor Sparks, Andrew Falkowski, & Jared Duffy.

What if a materials lab on Earth could screen a hundred alloys a day with little input from the scientist? Taylor and Andrew sit down with Joseph Krause, CEO and co-founder of Radical AI, to dig into what it takes to build a self-driving lab and why most of the field is still missing the hard part. From discovering that flagship SEM and XRD instruments ship with no real data access (and rebuilding their entire OS around the workaround), to MATRIX — their multimodal vision-language model that hones in on a target property in roughly 20 experiments — Joseph walks through the technical bets that got them here. He explains why they're using language-model embeddings to teach Bayesian optimization what "28% titanium" actually means, why "scientific intuition" has to be measured as a delta between human and AI annotations, and why Radical is going all the way to manufacturing instead of licensing compositions — because the real IP, and the only training data that matters, lives on the production floor.

Nominations for the Materials Today Rising Star awards are currently open and close on July 31st. If you know an early career researcher in the fields of materials science and engineering you think deserves recognition you can submit them here. [LINK}

Check out Radical AI here [LINK] https://www.ses.ai/

This episode of the Materialism Podcast is sponsored by Momentum Transfer. Visit their website for more details about their measurement services. [LINK]

The Materialism Podcast is sponsored by Materials Today, an Elsevier community dedicated to the creation and sharing of materials science knowledge and experience through their peer-reviewed journals, academic conferences, educational webinars, and more. [LINK]

Thanks to Kolobyte and Alphabot for letting us use their music in the show!

If you have questions or feedback please send us emails at materialism.podcast@gmail.com or connect with us on social media: Instagram, Twitter.

Materialism Team: Taylor Sparks, Andrew Falkowski, & Jared Duffy.