My real worry is the comments. However, I am thinking that some version 'sort by following' or 'sort by relationships' might be a way to deal with that. That is, either the people you follow will be on top, or there will be a sorting bias depending upon degrees of separation between you and any given commentor. We shall see, in time. BTW, sorry about the bumpy style changes over the last day or so. I gave up fighting a Webkit quirk after an extended battle. Anyway, about this article... I went to the annual meeting of the Materials Research Society once to present some undergrad research. -Doping carbon nanotubes with iodine, squeezing them in a diamond vice, and looking at their Raman modes of vibration. Speaker-wise, the meeting was probably the dullest event I've ever attended. I sat through several carbon nanotube talks where each speaker began by spending 5 minutes repeating the same introduction of the previous speaker. Materials research folk are painfully dry. But, they do some of the most important stuff out there. IMHO, they really are the unsung heroes of modern technology. Almost every new advance in an existing technology goes back to a materials research lab, but the press is more interested in how much faster, smaller, etc., an existing product has become, not why. It's not a bad way to earn a living though. The IP can be very lucrative. Although that meeting pretty much killed any interest I might have had in the field, it gave me an appreciation for work.