Strong materials, such as ceramics, are often brittle and prone to snapping - but those that deform gracefully under tension, such as metals, are weaker.rnNow, Dongchan Jang and Julia Greer from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena have overcome this trade-off with zirconium-based metallic glasses -rnalloys that are formed of disordered metal atoms and that can be moulded when heated. They show that when the material is reduced in size to pillars measuring 100 nanometres in diameter (pictured below), it assumes both a metal-like ductility and a ceramic-like strength.rnThe authors suggest that internal flaws in the glass - which would shear the alloy apart in bulk form - find it much harder to propagate through the nanometre-scale structure.
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