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Souped-up hybrid crops, such as maize, bred through conventional techniques rather than high-tech genetic engineering, do not keep their desired properties from one generation to the next because of natural genetic shuffling.
ECONOMIST: Terminator genes
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Michael Demkowicz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is developing a model that he hopes will address the problem from a different direction: specifying a set of desired properties and then trying to predict the nanostructures needed to deliver them.
ECONOMIST: New materials for renewable energy
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Since the robocasting machine allows the researchers to manipulate several inks at once, they are able to make new kinds of composite materials this way interlacing the filigrees, and even leaving holes in the material if that helps to arrive at the desired properties.
ECONOMIST: A new way to build complicated materials, micron by micron