Silence Like Glass, aka Zwei Frauen
The problem is that glass breaks before it bends – even the tiniest fracture spreads rapidly in all directions until the entire pane shatters. In engineering terms, glass is strong (it can withstand a lot of stress before cracking) but not tough (it has little damage tolerance after the onset of cracking). This is in contrast to sheets of metal or plastic that can deform to accommodate small defects, making them generally tougher materials.
To a group of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Caltech, this begged the question: is it possible to engineer tougher glass by making it behave more like metal? The answer, it turns out, is yes.
photo { Maserati Quattroporte covered with 1,763 lbs of shattered glass by Luca Pancrazzi }
