Paris Smalls, a PhD student in MIT Dept. of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences who is part of Prof. Einstein's lab in ERL/Dept.of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been named to Forbes "Thirty Under Thirty," a prestigious list of young entrepreneurs. Smalls started a company called Eden GeoTech that plans to use pulsed electric stimulation for subsurface fracturing. Form the Forbes profile:

"Fracking for oil and gas consists of injecting high-pressure blasts of sandy water deep underground to fracture layers of oil-bearing rock. Eden GeoTech is developing a new way to fracture reservoir rock -- using pulsed electric stimulation instead. In practice, a custom power supply is used to create a voltage difference between electrodes inserted down in a reservoir, causing the heating of the reservoir, which induces thermal stresses, creating a network of micro-fractures through which oil and gas can flow."