Several rooms of a Pittsburgh materials testing laboratory called Matergenics have been dedicated to an unusual collection: 30 years of failure, consisting of broken things and twisted metal. Although it may all look like junk, each item, the materials failure it represents, has a story to tell and a surprising lesson to impart. The hands-on museum contains pieces ranging from a corroded Olympic diving board to exploded gas lines. The museum’s curator, materials scientist and Matergenics owner Mehrooz Zamanzadeh (Dr. Zee), points out that all these failures have one thing…
