Interesting speculation by a materials scientist.
Mind you as SF writer Wil McCarthy noted, when he got the idea for his "wellstone" stories after doing a piece for "WIRED" magazine on Quantum Dot technology, some scientists in that field can't see beyond their immediate applications.
Quantum Dots, if you were wondering, are a special experimental device; Imagnien a sheet of semiconductor material wafer (Like the material they punch microchip bases out of), but with a series of pits in it. Now, each pit due to electric charge, can hold a particle, such as a proton, neutron, or similar in the pit in a suspension. You can add further particles, and by using further close-by pits, create a sort of "Working model" of any atom,e you care to, including entirely unstable ones, if you have enough power to maintain the charge to hold it.
The material has half the abilities of the "Synthetic atom" and half that of the silicon/gallide or silicon/arsenic material. So if you created an artificial atom three times stronger than iron, it would be one and a half times stronger than an iron/semiconductor mix. McCarthy saw waht the scientists did no,t or at least didn't think about because it wasn't relevant to their study . . . . By changing the charge and balance of atoms in the dots, you literally program the matter to do what you wish.
McCarthy has called this type of thing "Wellstone" as in the well from which all other material can be brought forth; Theoretically, it's very much a perfect material for anything that needs to be flexible in all conditions, like a spacecraft hull, housing or equipment, and in fact the far future episodes of "ST: Discovery" have programmable matter systems in many functional devices.
And in the real world, as the article points out, metal-matrix materials are coming into play even today; The possibilities of recent casting advances for tungsten are already incredibly promising in a lot of fields.
