
Name: Ting Xu
Age: 35
Affiliation: University of California, Berkeley
Last fall, Ting Xu, a professor of materials science at the University of California at Berkeley, was suffering from headaches so severe that doctors worried she might have a brain tumor. But one neurologist suggested a simpler cause. How about cutting back on the 16-hour days in the lab, sleeping, and maybe even eating at normal times?
Xu has since eased her work schedule, but she’s no less productive. Earlier this year she co-authored a paper describing a new technique for coaxing tiny polymer strands to self-assemble into 10 trillion cylinders with precise patterns. The method could lead to discs the size of a quarter that store 175 DVDs’—7 terabits—worth of data. Then she tweaked the technique so it could be used to build a range of nanoparticle-based devices—super-efficient photovoltaic cells and energy storage systems, and higher-resolution flexible displays. Xu is smart, diligent and knowledgeable, says polymer physicist Thomas Russell of the University of Massachusetts, but more important,“she has imagination.”
And a youthful one at that. She loves the Transformers. She’s a devotee of Tom and Jerry—watching the warring cat-and-mouse duo helps her think. Like her cartoon heroes, Xu, a native of China, has always been restless. She played volleyball and ran track growing up, but neither wore her out. Her father would offer to boost her allowance if she could sit for more than 15 minutes at a time. He never had to pay, and that energy continues to drive her today.
After reporting on the self-assembly method, which she created with Russell, Xu immediately saw greater potential. The strands, she realized, could serve as minuscule cranes to arrange even smaller building materials and manufacture things like ultrasmall electronic devices and paper-thin, printable solar cells. In her most recent work, Xu combined the self-assembling polymers with nanoscopic particles. By forcing these particles to assume the underlying order of the polymers, she managed to get trillions of them to line up exactly as she wanted.
Xu hopes the work will give solar cells a competitive advantage over fossil fuels, for one thing, but she won’t be resting in the meantime. She’s constantly hunting for new ideas and designing experiments with the hope of surprising herself, not just confirming existing theories. “It’s important to think about science in a perpendicular way, not a parallel way,” she says. “Otherwise you end up painting other people’s houses.” —Gregory Mone
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I enjoyed the article, but was disappointed at first, because whomever posted (or wrote) it, did not bother to proof read it. The subject person featured, is introduced as "Michael Strand (also under the photo), but the whole article is about Michael Strano. I assume, for research purposes, the latter is accurate.
I know how!
When I was litle saw Star Wars too, but I was impress from the flying machines and now I'm able to make "Snow-Speeder" for example!!! And I have some ideas for new materials and way for fly including revolutionary engines...
Need only MONEY!!!
Lextir: These are called "typos" in the language of writers. "Typo" stands for typographical error. Errors are often defined as "common mistakes". Mistaking the name Strano for Strand by someone writing headings and captions, (as opposed to the individual who wrote the report and, hopefully, did research sufficient to get the subject's name right) is not impossible. They are similar, and Strand is somewhat more common that Strano. Nor does it require an arrogant and supercilious response. Somebody made a mistake. We humans, most of the rest of us being mere mortals, do that on occasion.
Lextir, Observer is right. It was probably a typo. An example of poor proofing was kindly provided by Observer when he said, "We humans, most of the rest of us being mere mortals, do that on occasion."
If proofed, that statement would have benefited from hyphens rather than the use of commas to express his thoughts.
Well, typos aside, I enjoyed it. As a university teacher of writing and myself a writer, I can observe that the choice in the instance cited between commas and hyphens is a toin coss, really; not all rules of punctuation and grammar were written on the backside of the 10 Commandments, after all! ;-) A little individual choice is stilly permissable, even in, say, the MLW Stylesheet and the Chicago Manual of Style.
While realizing these young people are genuinely exceptional, they do provide encouragement that not *all* of us are lazy sloths (as I tend to be, so I'm looking in the mirror!).
Part of the excitement about the areas in which these folks are working is that any of those areas could yield applicable results in the wider world at lightening speed. (Of course, it may turn out that none of them work out for years or decades to come, or maybe not at all.)
But consider something I read online just yesterday: about 10 of today's better work fields didn't EXIST -- just six years ago. (No, I didn't do the research to verify that.)
Then there's the exponential growth in knowledge; call it "Moore's Law Writ Large," if you will. A desktop computer I bought in 1997 had more processing power than the entire Mission Control in Houston had when we landed the first men on the Moon -- and that's from NASA, which happened to have an article using my exact computer as a comparison, not from the manufacturer. And that's stunning.
Further, the people who are the subjects of this article will undoubtedly inspire even younger young, bright sparks who will light their own torches.
Sigh. Who am I to talk? MLA Stylesheet, not MLW!!!