 The interdisciplinary field of material science, also commonly termed material science and engineering is the design and discovery of new materials, particularly solids. The intellectual origins of material science stem from the Enlightenment, when researchers began to use analytical thinking from chemistry, physics, and engineering to understand ancient, phenomenal logical observations in metallurgy and mineralogy. Material science still incorporates elements of physics, chemistry, and engineering. As such, the field was long considered by academic institutions as a subfield of these related fields. Beginning in the 1940s, material science began to be more widely recognized as a specific and distinct field of science and engineering, and major technical universities around the world created dedicated schools of the study, within either the science or engineering schools, hence the naming. Material science is a synthetic discipline hybridizing metallurgy, ceramics, solid state physics, and chemistry. It is the first example of a new academic discipline emerging by fusion rather than fission. Many of the most pressing scientific problems humans currently face are due to the limits of the materials that are available and how they are used. Thus, breakthroughs in material science are likely to affect the future of technology significantly. Material scientists emphasize understanding how the history of a material its processing influences its structure, and thus the material's properties and performance. The understanding of processing structure-properties relationships is called the material's paradigm. This paradigm is used to advance understanding in a variety of research areas, including nanotechnology, biomaterials, and metallurgy. Material science is also an important part of forensic engineering and failure analysis, investigating materials, products, structures or components which fail or do not function as intended, causing personal injury or damage to property. Such investigations are key to understanding, for example, the causes of various aviation accidents and incidents.