Better living through stress and strain: MIT materials scientist Gene Fitzgerald has devised a way to make chips run faster by straining the silicon first.

(Ok, this is getting scary now. Gene Fitzgerald is the third of my college fraternity housemates to move on to do Great Things. Gene is a star professor at MIT and co-founder of his own startup company, AmberWave. One of my former roommates Karl Sims won a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1998 for ground-breaking work in computer graphics. And Brewster Kahle co-founded Alexa, and is also the inventor of the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine. Maybe I should have drunk more beer with those guys back then!...)