Question: What is your favourite material to mess around with

Anna Kalorkoti answered on 14 Nov 2019:

Shape-memory alloys (SMAs) are really fun. These are metals that you can stretch and bend to give them a new shape, and then when you heat them up, they go back to their original shape. I first got to play with these at university, taking a little metal spring and stretching it so much the spring shape was basically destroyed, then dropping it in a cup of boiling water and seeing it curl back up into spring form again (I think I still have that spring somewhere in my house…). These days, the company I work for uses SMAs to help make aeroplanes better at dealing with damage from being hit by things like birds.