 University
of Washington’s Younan Xia: Thinking Big in Nanotech
How big is a billionth of a meter? The answer, as the Harvard chemist
George Whitesides once remarked, depends on your point of view. To engineers and materials
scientists, structures on this nanometer scale are exceptionally small, and so the macroscopic patterning techniques they would use to create nanometer-scaled structures on a chip, for instance, would have to be incredibly precise. To chemists, like the former Whitesides student Younan
Xia, now of the University of Washington, a nanometer can be exceptionally large. And because these chemists are used to synthesizing molecules on this nanometer scale, and doing so in huge numbers—by the mole-full, in the lingo of chemistry—the pursuit of new nanostructures for the burgeoning field of
nanotechnology has now become the purview of chemists as well, using the techniques of molecular self-assembly to build these structures from the atomic level on up.
Few researchers in
this field have taken advantage of this cross-disciplinary revolution as
has Xia, who is now the fourth-hottest scientist in the field of
materials science, according to the latest listing in Thomson Scientific’s
Essential
Science Indicators
of the...
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 U.S. Government Research Facilities: How in the World Do They Compare?
This time, Science Watch turns its attention to U.S.
government research institutions and  their citation performance over the last
decade. In the featured tables, facilities representing the
U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Energy, the
Department of Defense, and other agencies are ranked according to their total
citations in 11 main fields of science.
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