From the bronze thru the silicon age, materials have revolutionized key technologies. Energy utilization, communication, transportation, defense and leisure are all dependent on the latest materials. Condensed matter physicists study materials and their properties, from the quantum interactions among atoms to phenomena emerging at larger length scales. For example, ISU groups are designing structured materials to control photons (light), similar to the way transistors control electrons. Their pioneering work in 1990 on photonic band gap materials has led to an explosion of research worldwide, with over 1000 scientific articles published last year. Another group has used combinatorial methods to optimize materials for light emission from organic light emitting diodes. They have recently fabricated thin films that hold the record for the highest brightness per watt for white light. A team of researchers has led the world in citations for their recent work on understanding the properties of the newly discovered superconductor, MgB2. They have now developed doping methods to improve its current carrying capacity, so that commercial applications may be viable soon. Several groups are involved with using national synchrotron x-ray and neutron scattering facilities to study materials properties. At the Advanced Photon Source, novel method to electro-statically levitate a sample of pure liquid Si, while being bombarded with intense x-rays, has solved a long standing debate about the coordination of Si atoms in the liquid state as it is cooled toward the freezing point. At the High Flux Isotope Reactor, the magnetic and lattice displacement properties of a complicated material, Gd5Ge2Si2, grown by local metallurgical groups, were measured to understand why it is the leading candidate material for magnetic refrigeration, a technology which promises to obviate the need to compress gases in standard refrigerators.