michEllE khinE
Shrink Nanotechnologies
bran fErr En
Applied Minds
There aren’t many compa-
nies that can count Intel,
Lockheed Martin, the U.S.
Air Force Research Lab, the
Library of Congress, and
Herman Miller as clients.
But for former Disney Ima-
gineer Bran Ferren, being
an inventor means creating
just about anything that
makes the world a better
place. Uniting technology,
science, art, and the human
experience—“what we
desire rather than what we
need”—is essential, Ferren
says, whether he’s working
on transportation, energy,
entertainment, or the mili-
tary. Or on his latest per-
sonal project, the MaxiMog
II, “a big truck designed to
drive around a world.”
mitch rEsnick
MI T Media Lab
As director of the Lifelong
Kindergarten group, Mitch
Resnick launched the
easy-to-use programming
language called Scratch to
take the intimidation out of
coding. “It’s nothing like the
brackets and semicolons of
traditional programming,”
he says. Graphical blocks
are dragged and snapped
together to control ani-
mated characters, letting
kids around the world
create interactive stories,
games, and animations.
“it’s hard to
get high
resolution
on chips. you
have to use
expensive
equipment”—
or a kid’s toy.
as a kid, Michelle Khine loved Shrinky
Dinks. So when she didn’t have the
equipment at the University of Califor-
nia, Merced, that she needed to make
chips with tiny fluid-filled cavities for
use in experiments and medical diag-
nostics, Khine improvised: She printed
chip patterns onto her beloved child-
hood toy. “Typically, the difficulty and
the cost is how to pattern at such a fine
scale,” says Khine, now an assistant
professor at UC Irvine. “The smaller
you go, the more expensive it’s going
to be.” Shrinky Dinks offered a cheap,
elegant solution. As the printed plastic
shrank in a toaster oven, the deposits
of ink on top thickened, yielding a mold
for a chip with small wells on its surface.
Recognizing the potential market for
affordable microdevices, she helped
found Shrink Nanotechnologies, which
develops molecular-detection plat-
forms, rapid-prototyping kits, and
stem-cell tools—innovations that may
make microf luidic devices more acces-
sible to scientists and speed impor-
tant research. “A lot of these devices
have been stuck in the labs that have
the expertise to make them,” she says.
“Now, you can go in and print the
design you want.”
natsumi i Wasaki
Author
Natsumi Iwasaki’s recipe
for a Japanese best seller:
Tap into his country’s
obsession with baseball
and . . . add tips from late
management guru Peter
Drucker? It’s an odd mix,
but What If a Female Man-
ager of a High School Base-
ball Team Read Drucker’s
‘Management’? has sold
more than 2 million copies
since its December 2009
release—and empowered
a new generation of Japa-
nese citizens to create its
own change. A manga
version came out in Decem-
ber, and an anime series
debuted in April.
Photograph by JoE pUGliEsE
