great article; thanks for posting. vextec's site is here - http://www.vextec.com/ http://www.vextec.com/ - and the patents for what i guess are the core techno

great article; thanks for posting. vextec's site is here - http://www.vextec.com/ http://www.vextec.com/ - and the patents for what i guess are the core technology are here - http://www.vextec.com/our-technology/patents http://www.vextec.com/our-technology/patents from reading the first article it seems that they extend finite element analysis down to the level of crystals (they say "microstructure based") (which is what you'd guess from the wired article). there's more detail related to particular models (crack nucleation and growth) that i don't completely get - i suppose those are different approximations used in the models (and where the hard science is). and then they seem to do monte-carlo on top of that.