#materialsscienceandengineering

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Welcome to 2026 everyone! I thought I'd wrap up 2025 with a couple quick tag stats! This sort of roundup wouldn't be possible without some tools, so shout out to drunkonschadenfreude.com, which is what I used to generate a list of tags. There are 181 pages on my blog from 2025, with ten posts on each page, minus the last page which only has nine from 2025, so I took a look at the tags for my last 1809 posts.

My top ten tags were:

Polymers (257)

Nanotechnology (199)

Electronics (185)

Materials processing (163)

Biomaterials (159)

Computational materials science (145)

Catalysts (118)

Materials characterization (103)

Reactions (101)

2D materials (100)

The elements that got tagged the most in 2025 were Iron (50), Hydrogen (50), Carbon (39), Copper (39), Aluminum (29), Gold (24), Nickel (24), Titanium (24), Silicon (23), Oxygen (22), Lithium (21), Bismuth (21), and Gallium (21)!

And of unique materials (rather than categories of materials, like polymers or catalysts), Water (61), Graphene (30), Cellulose (25), and Carbon dioxide (22) were posted about the most.

Happy new year, and thanks for being there in 2025!

[materialsscienceandengineering]

If you've been here a while, you might have noticed that I did some themed posts on sound/acoustics in March, and on color in June. I missed the planned September topic (I plan to get around to that maybe March of next year), but the December topic—computational materials science—is on track, so expect some posts on a handful of different computational materials science methods over the next month! The tag will be Dec25Posts, or you could just search the general Computational materials science tag on the blog, or my personal tag for posts I write, MyMSEPost.

[materialsscienceandengineering]

I think you are one of the coolest blogs on tumblr

Thank you! I'm glad people are still enjoying the blog! (Materials science is cool, isn't it! 😁)

[materialsscienceandengineering]

June 2025 Theme Wrap Up

June is done, and with it the end of the themed #color posts. If you want to catch up on anything you missed, feel free to check out the #June25Posts and #June25Reblog tags, or go back to the March #acoustics and #sound theme with the #March25Posts and #March25Reblog tags.

As per the poll at the end of last year, the themed posts for September will be on energy sources! Hope you enjoyed learning about color!

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Alright folks, that's a wrap on the elemental posts! Thanks for all the likes and reblogs over the years, but I have officially run through them three times, and the information in them is getting a little outdated! (Did you know, when I started them, the last few elements didn't even have names yet? That's how old this blog is!)

So, I am officially retiring the element posts. They'll always be available for viewing on the blog (you can find links for all the tags here).

Thanks again, and I hope you enjoyed the little daily tidbits over the years!

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Polymers, amirite?

(I am a biotechnologist that would very much like to make us better at recycling plastics by making microbes eat them and spit out their component bits so we can reassemble them as needed)

Polymers for sure! 💜 (I say as someone who took one organic chemistry class and immediately locked in on the metals/ceramics track at my undergrad institution...)

No, but seriously, polymers are cool! Polysiloxane anyone? I also have an irrational fondness of polyurethane because it's fun to say. And who's not a fan of rubber?

(I think we would all like to get better at recycling plastics for sure, but I think there's good progress going on on that front!)

[materialsscienceandengineering]

What's your favorite metal (pure elemental as well as alloy)?

Terribly sorry, this got lost in my drafts and has been sitting there for months! Oops!

Great question, though, thanks!

I have a fondness for titanium and titanium alloys (Ti-6Al-4V), simply because that's what I have the most experience with, I know the microstructures it can form, processing methods, phase transformations, etc. So titanium is at the top of my list.

But, honorable mentions:

Cobalt. I really like cobalt blue. And cobalt is a cool element by itself.

I also really like tungsten. Not sure if it's the name/symbol combination, or if it's just the heaviest element I'm probably ever going to hold (I mean, there's gold, but, eh. Gold's more impressive for its non-reactivity.) in a decent size, or if it's all of tungsten's many "awards" (highest melting and boiling points). Or maybe I just think refractories are neat.

Gallium. Melts at/near room temperature. Liquid metals are cool.

Tin. Its near room temperature phase transition is really neat. Love to see it in person some day.

High entropy alloys. Also very neat.

But I'm going to cut this list off here before I start talking about reasons to love every possible metal/alloy.

(...do metallic glasses count as alloys? 😁)

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Merry March everyone! Based on a poll I ran back at the end of 2024, expect plenty of sound and acoustics themed posts this month. Not every post will be on these topics - there will be regular posts interspersed - but it'll be the general theme for March.

I'll be using the tags #March25Reblog to reblog old news articles from this blog that are relevant, the tag #March25Posts for new posts I write (which will also have the usual #MyMSEPost tag), and feel free to check out the #Sound and #Acoustics tags as well!