University of Maryland-College Park and NIST researchers have discovered that materials such as silica that are quite brittle in bulk form behave as ductile as gold at the nanoscale.

At the macroscale, the point at which a material will fail or break depends on its ability to maintain its shape when stressed. The atoms of ductile substances are able to shuffle around and remain cohesive for much longer than brittle substances containing faint structural flaws that act as failure points. At the nanoscale, these structural flaws do not exist, and hence the materials are nearly “perfect.”