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Ring farewell to the century of physics, the one in which we split the atom and turned silicon into computing power. It's time to ring in the century of biotechnology. Just as the discovery of the electron in 1897 was a seminal event for the 20th century, the seeds for the 21st century were spawned in 1953, when James Watson blurted out to Francis Crick how four nucleic acids could pair to form the self-copying code of a DNA molecule. Now we're just a few years away from one of the most important breakthroughs of all time...
...then, that the leafy tranquillity of Sterling's well-appointed Austin, Texas, home is shattered only by his two-year-old daughter Laura's careening through the living room like a stray electron? (Dad prefers "like a misrouted Internet packet.") "I like starting with a set of initial conditions and just extrapolating," he says. In this case, the initial conditions came courtesy of Mother Russia, whose meltdown Sterling covered for Wired back in 1993. "I was watching a huge 20th century superpower fall apart at the seams," he says. Extrapolating from Moscow to the U.S. was a simple matter...
Sarnoff was born in Uzlian, Russia, in 1891 (the year the electron was christened; he often bragged they were born the same year) and traveled steerage to New York nine years later with his family. Knowing no English, he helped support his family by selling newspapers and with other small jobs. At 15 he bought a telegraph key, learned Morse code and, after being hired as an office boy for the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. of America, became a junior operator...
Kohl's experiments initially focused on the electron, a relatively light subatomic particle, determining its temperature to be about 1 million degrees Celsius...
What is most remarkable about the spacecraft is how it gets from place to place. After being launched by an ordinary rocket, DS1 will be pushed through space by an engine that works by firing electrons into atoms of xenon gas, stripping each of an electron and giving the atoms an electric charge--ionizing them. The ions are then accelerated through an electric field and emitted from thrusters at 65,000 m.p.h. Despite that speed, the particles produce little thrust, comparable to the weight of a piece of paper...