MaterialsInMotion

The day started at 6:30 a.m. and with the entire residence hall scrambling to check their AP scores. I don’t know why I expected much else, but when you put a bunch of STEM-oriented competitive high schoolers in the same building, of course all they’re going to be talking about is academics.

After a mediocre breakfast consisting of flavorless eggs, chicken sausages with a strange texture, and surprisingly well-fried hash browns, we were off to class. My cluster’s professor is Edward Kolodka, but he goes by Ed. He was a professor at the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks for 18 years before moving to UC Merced two years ago.

In the morning, he spoke about what material science is and how it affects our everyday lives. His main driving point was that material science is behind every object we see and use and that material science is all about optimizing products to be cheaper, more efficient, and less polluting. He used one phrase that could summarize this idea: from atom to appliance.

In the afternoon, we were supposed to conduct two labs, but unfortunately the materials for these labs weren’t delivered yet, so instead Professor Kolodka gave us super-macro cameras to play around with and to look at various objects magnified up to 1600 times. Below are my favorite among the pictures that I took using these cameras.

One thing today that stuck out to me was when we talked about how joint and dental implants are made of titanium. I never considered that if implants weren’t made of the right material, the immune system would have a foreign object response and try to attack the implant, causing inflammation and most likely death. I was also surprised to learn that the body not only tolerates titanium but will also grow its bones to mold around the implant. This piece of information has me wondering how scientists discovered that the human body reacts to titanium in this way, and which animals did these scientists experiment on?