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These are looking promising:

William Chueh: Pulling hydrogen out of water with the help of concentrated sunlight and an inexpensive material

Prashant Jain: Tuning nanocrystals to make tinier, more efficient switches for optical computing and solar panels

Shannon Miller: Making engines super-efficient by getting them to run at extremely high pressures

Bozhi Tian: Artificial tissue that can monitor and improve health down to the level of individual cells

Zheng Wang: Slowing light to help chips cope with optical data

Why is it interesting that these people are under 35? Is there any more merit to being an innovator at 33 than, say, at 44?
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I think it is actually that these folks are unusually accomplished for their age. (disclaimer: I was awarded TR35 a while ago. )
Did anyone say it was interesting?

Maybe they are just trying to draw traffic. Use whatever sort of headlines traditionally work best for that. This particular one: "blah, blah, blah Under 30" has been around for a long time. It's editor-friendly.

What's fun about the web is anyone can gather these sorts of stories, archive them and then check back on the names mentioned 5, 10, 15 years later. In many cases, these people and their companies are all but forgotten. They got mentioned in an article and nothing more. In many cases, they paid a PR firm to get them the mention.

One thing is true in all cases: The goal of the article is to draw traffic.

pg wrote a nice essay about the role of PR in startups.

Name dropping in the right publications is a business expense for startups. Entrepreneurs routinely pay for placement in articles like these (but maybe not this one).

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