A material’s name is the least informative thing about it, and that is the whole reason I write this site.
Give me a grade and you have told me something about chemistry. You have not told me the product form, the processing condition, the section thickness, the direction I am loading it in, how hot it gets on a bad afternoon, or what condenses on it overnight. Those are the things that decide what happens next.
I came to this from earth science and applied geodetics — I co-founded an engineering firm, Shoring Labs — where the same discipline applies to ground rather than to metal. The specimen is not the site. The test condition is part of the result. A certificate answers a narrower question than the one you are actually asking, and knowing which question it answered is most of the work.
So the articles start from unlikely objects. A bookshelf made of lead. A gate carrying a certificate from the wrong jurisdiction. The object holds a mechanism still long enough to trace it from the property to the procedure with the conditions still attached.
I also write fiction, mostly horror, and the appetite is not unrelated: there is a particular pleasure in watching an ordinary object turn out to have been obeying rules nobody read to you.