“Ms. Zhou knows the drill. For years, she labored in a factory, the best job she could get having grown up in an impoverished village in central China.” The NYT’s David Barboza on the world’s richest self-made woman and her company’s glass screens (that you’re likely to be touching as you click on this link).

+ How can we build increasingly giant skyscrapers that are coated almost entirely in glass? The short answer: “These days glass isn’t just glass.” The longer answer involves a look into nanotechnology.