News & Views item - October 2011

 

 

Science Announces Western Australian is Winner of "Dance Your Ph.D". (October 21, 2011)

Joel Miller's research at the University of Western Australia uses titanium  together with advanced manufacturing techniques to try to overcome the main reason why orthopaedic implants fail.

 

According to Miller: "Bone needs stress to grow and to maintain strength, yet current hip replacement implants are too stiff - they constrain the affixed bone and prevent it from stretching. The bone around the implant starts to deteriorate and the bond between bone and implant fails."

 

By using various alloys together with "Selective Laser Melting" Miller" hopes to reduce the stiffness of the implant and match it to that of bone in order to overcome "the main reason why orthopaedic implants fail. If successful, this work will help lead to more durable implants, reducing the need for revision surgery and allowing orthopaedic implants to be used on younger adult patients".

 

Miller's entry in Science's "Dance Your Ph.D. contest "Microstructure-Property relationships in Ti2448 components produced by Selective Laser Melting: A Love Story" has won the grand-prize of US$1000 and he gets a free trip to Belgium to be crowned champion 22 November at TEDxBrussels, a gathering of scientists, artists, and business leaders.

 

Science noted that: "Miller's entry was unusual in that, unlike all of the other entrants, he didn't film his dance. "We didn't have a video camera," he says. So he and his friends shot a series of 2200 still photographs of the dance in action and then converted the photos into stop-motion animation. That allowed Miller to appear to fly over the ground wearing silvery spandex and a cape as he danced with women representing titanium's alpha and beta crystalline forms.

 

"Each dance had to be based on a scientist's Ph.D. research, and that scientist had to be part of the dance. A record 55 dances were submitted to this year's contest, covering everything from psychology to astrophysics. Last week, 16 finalists were chosen by six previous winners of the contest. The finalists were then scored by a panel of judges that included scientists from Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Boston University, as well as choreographers from Pilobolus and the entire dance cast of Shadowland."