#michigan tech

ICE is going to my hometown next week. This little tiny town with a university with a MASSIVE international population.

I don't know what to do. I don't know what I can do since I'm unable to travel and get there anytime soon. Not that my presence would change anything but I'm terrified for my old sweet Mexican coworker who was still learning English. I don't have her contact information. I'm so scared for everyone there.

Past presidents didn't even remember to put that half of the state on a map! Look out folks in the U.P. (upper peninsula of Michigan) ICE is coming and it's not the slippery kind on the road. They are planning to show up during Winter Carnival where eveyone comes out to enjoy the snow sculptures.

The strength of teeth is told on the scale of millimeters. Porcelain smiles are kind of like ceramics -- except that while china plates shatter when smashed against each other, our teeth don't, and it's because they are full of defects.

Those defects are what inspired research led by Susanta Ghosh, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics at Michigan Technological University. The work came out recently in the journal Mechanics of Materials. Along with a team of dedicated graduate students -- Upendra Yadav, Mark Coldren and Praveen Bulusu -- and fellow mechanical engineer Trisha Sain, Ghosh examined what's called the microarchitecture of brittle materials like glass and ceramics.

"Since the time of alchemists people have tried to create new materials," Ghosh said. "What they did was at the chemical level and we work at the microscale. Changing the geometries -- the microarchitecture -- of a material is a new paradigm and opens up many new possibilities because we're working with well-known materials."

Glass is one such material. Making stronger glass brings us back to teeth -- and seashells. On the micro level, the primary hard and brittle components of teeth and shells have weak interfaces or defects. These interfaces are filled with soft polymers. As teeth gnash and shells bump, the soft spots cushion the hard plates, letting them slide past one another. Under further deformation, they get interlocked like hook-and-loop fasteners or Velcro, thus carrying huge loads. But while chewing, no one would be able to see the shape of a tooth change with the naked eye. The shifting microarchitecture happens on the scale of microns, and its interlocking structure rebounds until a sticky caramel or rogue popcorn kernel pushes the sliding plates to the breaking point.