Electrostrictive materials, hard ceramics and soft polymers, have been used as precision actuators in many engineering applications.
This material is hard and wear-resistant, but it has no ductility at all.
Of his masterpiece, "Cabaret," The New Yorker's Pauline Kael wrote, "It's miraculous because the material is hard and unsentimental, and until now there has never been a diamond-hard big American movie musical".
The high nanoparticle content makes the hybrid material very hard and wear resistant even enabling to scratch corals and stones.
Such materials are hard and inflexible; epoxy resins are an example.
Durable edifices are rarely, at least in the West, constructed of fragile materials, but "hard" and "soft" are no longer the defining properties of either architecture or fashion.
These coatings exhibited key structural characteristics that are known to render many naturally occurring materials extremely hard and robust.
Magnetic materials, both hard and soft, are fundamental to the technological success of many devices and products, in particular electric machines and related devices that are used in domestic appliances.
In the letter, obtained by The New York Times, the acting United States attorney in Washington, Jeffrey A. Taylor, asked for the safekeeping of "documents and items" in Mr. Foley's former offices "including his computer, electronic storage materials, hard copy documents and other items".
In addition, builders can find materials hard to get and deliveries unreliable.
