Justice meted out in domestic courts is assumed to promote social healing and quell the desire for revenge felt by victims of violence. Mass atrocity, genocide, terrorism and other types of extreme violence have spawned new approaches to justice, such as extrajudicial proceedings and international tribunals. Drawing from personal experience as a survivor of a terror attack and anthropological research on responses to extreme violence in the United States, Europe and Africa, Hirsch will explore several emerging approaches to justice that seek to fulfill the expectations of victims and societies. At this juncture, in pursuing justice for the world’s worst crimes, should we be more unilateralist or more universalist, more modest or more aggressive?

The metals and alloys we are familiar with are all crystalline and well understood. In contrast, their recently emerged amorphous counterparts, i.e., “bulk metallic glasses” (BMGs), pose new challenges to the materials science community. Here even the basic issues, such as why they are such easy glass formers, how atoms pack inside, and how plastic deformation proceeds in the absence of well-defined dislocations, have not been resolved.
We report in situ nano-compression and nano-tensiton tests of metallic glasses (MGs) in a transmission electron microscope. This new technique is capable of spatially and temporally resolving the plastic flow in MGs. The observations reveal the intrinsic ability of monolithic MGs to sustain large plastic strains (with gradual necking in tension as known for ductile crystalline metals), which would otherwise be pre-empted by catastrophic instability in macroscopic samples and conventional tests. The high ductility in volume-limited MGs, and the sample size effects in suppressing the rapid failure common to glasses, is explained by considering the evolution of the collectivism of flow defects towards localization.