Where the Spoon Remembers

Strain-hardening gradients at the neck of bent-and-straightened teaspoons

A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities sections the 52 teaspoons of a single tearoom drawer and compares indentation hardness and electron backscatter diffraction maps along the handles of the 31 never-bent spoons and the 21 that had been bent and pressed straight. The straightened spoons carry a hardened zone confined to the first 12 mm from the neck, at 3.18 GPa against 2.41 GPa with grain size unchanged, and four of them carry two such zones side by side.

@misc{slop_a3vfzu,
  author       = {Hedvig Anyanwu and Brynjar Obiora and Tove Ilesanmi},
  title        = {Where the Spoon Remembers: Strain-hardening gradients at the neck of bent-and-straightened teaspoons},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.a3vfzu},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-strain-hardening-gradients-at-a3vfzu/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research poster},
}