With applications in almost every realm of manufacturing and construction technology, steel has been the material on which the very structure of modern society has been built. In recent years, though, the heavy and unwieldy nature of steel has seen its decline as lighter – but more brittle – alloys replace it. Now a team of engineers has created a steel alloy that should be cheaper to produce than competing alloys, while being exceptionally strong without being brittle. The researchers believe that the new steel alloy could be incorporated in everything from motor vehicles and spacecraft to tools and armor.

A multidisciplinary team from the University of California at San Diego (UC SanDiego), the University of Southern California (USC) and the California Institute of Technology (CIT), has created a new amorphous metal dubbed SAM2X5-630 by using metallic glass matrix composites (MGMC) to replace a number of atoms in standard steel's crystal-like structure.