Strange matter at Mid-America

The Mid-America Science Museum is pleased to announce its summer exhibit Strange Matter.

This interactive exhibit opens Memorial Day weekend allowing visitors the chance to experience and investigate the structure of materials and their properties. There is a lot to discover in materials science, because everything around you is made of materials. For example: there is metal in bicycles, plastic in contact lenses, glass in computer monitors and foam in your running shoes. Strange Matter reveals the hidden world of materials science and provides information on where to find them in your everyday life. Highlights of this exhibit include:

Amorphous Metals: Drop the ball bearings to see which metal plate gives the ball the most bounce. The ball that
keeps going and going and going is bouncing on a plate made of Liquidmetal® alloy, a type of amorphous metal and, one of the world's hardest materials. Discover what makes it so hard and how this metal can improve your golf game and help a patient in the operating room.

Structures and Defects: Are defects always bad? It depends on the properties the materials scientist is trying to create. Play with a sheet of ball bearings and discover how this simple model can be used to investigate the role ‘grain boundaries' play in creating stronger metals.

Touch Table: Younger children can discover materials through hands-on experimentation. Put different materials under the lens of a microscope camera to see how they look magnified larger than life. Play tunes on a wooden xylophone and a xylophone of mixed materials – do similar materials sound the same? Tumble tubes to
see how a solid material can flow like a liquid.

ZOOM: Get a look at materials from the macro (or naked-eye) scale down to the nano scale. Intricate structures are revealed. Find out how scientists “feel” atoms using atomic force microscopes. Be the materials scientist and get down to details.

About the Strange Matter Exhibition:
Strange Matter is presented by the Materials Research Society. The exhibition and its tour are made possible by the generous support of the National Science Foundation, Alcan, Dow, Ford Motor Company Fund, Intel® Innovation in Education and 3M Foundation. This local presentation is made possible by AT&T The Real Yellow Pages.

About the Materials Research Society:
The Materials Research Society is a not-for-profit scientific association founded in 1973 to promote interdisciplinary goal-oriented research on materials of technological importance. Membership in the Society consists of approximately 16,000 scientists from industry, government, academia and research laboratories in the United States and nearly 50 other countries.