Craig Grimes, a materials scientist at Pennsylvania State University, has been working on nanotubes made of titanium compounds.

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Jim Hedrick, a materials scientist with IBM Research, never really set out to tackle the MRSA (methicillin-resistantStaphylococcus aureus) problem.

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"They are not much larger than the dimensions of a neuron in the brain, " said materials scientist John Rogers at the University of Illinois, who helped develop them.

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I'm stood with an Egyptian materials scientist entrepreneur, in the middle of the desert, having been joined by a cowboy in a replica of a British Fifties car made from NASA technology.

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After ten years of research, David Martin, a materials scientist at the University of Michigan, came up with a polymer that could help deaf people hear and blind people see.

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Materials scientist Dr. Walid A. Daoud and textile scientist Dr. John Xin, both from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), used nanotechnology -- whereby the tiniest particles available to man are used -- to come up with the concept.

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These include Yuri Suzuki, a materials scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who is building stacks of metal oxides in the hopes that, when combined with carbon-based materials, they'll blend into a new kind of semiconductor that can control spin at normal temperatures.

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But it seems unlikely that the scientist could have moved materials from Pakistan's heavily guarded nuclear plants without the knowledge, and perhaps the help, of senior military officers.

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