ed for building things, are often used for controlling energy and information. Across the ages, technology advanced with metals through an intensive R & D. Today, new processes arrange metal grains to create tougher, easier-to-shape alloys, such as superplastic steel that can stretch 11 times its original length. Copper, which carried telegraph , telephone, and other communications for more than a hundred years, has given way to glass, in the form of fiber optic cables. The digital signals in these cables carry much more information than copper conductors of the same size or cost.Material scientists are working now to make new kinds of glass that further reduce the cost of optical-fiber networks. They are making the glass so pure that light can travel in it for a hundred miles without any loss. MIT engineers are now developing new forms of silicon that will carry light signals even more efficiently than the best glass. For them, silicon is the key to recent technological progress. Another promising new material being researched and developed is nitinol. The smart wire nitinol remembers its shape. The nickel and titanium alloy can be twisted into spiral, heated, and dipped in ice and reheated and it would twist back to spiral. Makers of spring and bra supports find uses for the “memory alloy”. In addition, auto manufacturing R & D scientists are exploring the use of nitrogen ions. Nitrogen ions, used to beam down on a car crankshaft, harden the metal without the potential distortion of high-heat treatments. Such advances project new chapters for the 5,500 -year history of metals. RESEARCH AND FUTURE TRENDS With the integration of the modern PC to the manufacturing operations, a myriad of future and meaningful research and development will be inevitable. In June of 2000, IBM Corporation confirmed that it would soon deliver from its Research and Development Center what it calls the fastest and most powerful comp...
