Engineers Make Like a Tree

by Elizabeth Svoboda Wired News, 10 Jul 2006 An engineer by training, Ken Sandhage had no idea what diatoms were until he took a bus seat next to a woman who was poring over a book about them. "I was curious," Sandhage remembers, "so I asked her what she was reading." Her answer fascinated him -- she was a biologist studying single-celled algae that under a microscope had skeletons resembling ornate seashells. As the bus rolled on, Sandhage was jolted by a sudden insight. What if he could model nanodevices after diatoms? Read more