 I am Dr. Oliver Taylor. I'm a geotechnical engineer here at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center. This project is from particles to planets. It's unlocking the physics of near-surface soil mechanics. What we are studying is we are studying how particles go from single grains to larger entities and how they fail and the mechanics of why this occurs. The list of steps that we do is we get the material from the area that we're interested in. We separate the material, we wash it, we dry it, we take it out of the oven, we separate it into the quantities that we're after, we add a fluid to it, we let that fluid come to an equilibrium or a uniformity throughout our specimen and then we build our sandcastle by applying compactive energy. Once we've applied our energy or how many times we compact each layer, there are four layers. We unwrap the specimen from the mold and that becomes our sandcastle. From there we let that dry for two days to get to a fully dried sample or any other predetermined amount to get to a saturation that we are after. And then once we reach our testing point we load it up with weights and we video it under high-speed videography so we can learn all the mechanics that we need to know. So in my line of work when assumptions fail, soldiers die. So what this really means is when we don't understand what's going on well enough, unintended consequences occur, not might occur, but they do occur and those end up costing lives and that's what we're trying to mitigate. So let's think about the importance of this in a relatively relatable example. If I have a road and I drive my armored personnel carrier down this road and it's dry, I can take that vehicle and I can scream down the road very fast and it doesn't do anything. Now if it rains a little bit more what ends up happening is those vehicles then get stuck and when they're stuck and they can't go anywhere then that's where soldiers get trapped. So we're trying to understand the mechanics behind the soil to prevent this from happening so that we understand when and how the soil is going to give way.