Engineers at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, created the world’s first large, flexible piece of RHEA metal, an alloy twice as strong as steel and three times as strong as aluminum. The breakthrough comes from using lower, slower heating during manufacturing to control how atoms self-organize, rather than fully melting the metal at high temperatures. The method, tested on an alloy of titanium, hafnium, tantalum, niobium and zirconium, produced a defect-free internal structure with a compressive yield strength over 2 gigapascals while retaining ductility. “For more than a century, alloy development has focused on composition and processing,” said Professor Jian-Feng Nie, Monash’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “Our work suggests that how atoms organize during manufacturing may be just as important.”