PHILADELPHIA -- Drexel University engineering student Teng Zhang took up Chinese calligraphy recently, seeking a connection with family members in China whom he has not seen since before the COVID-19 pandemic.
But as often happens with beginning calligraphers, he struggled when using diluted, lighter-hued inks, watching in dismay as the colors bled through his porous, gossamer-thin paper.
The solution to Zhang’s blurry brushstrokes, he realized, lay in engineering. With Lunar New Year approaching, the Ph.D. student tried in December to make ink using tiny flakes of a high-tech, metallic material that his boss, Drexel professor Yury Gogotsi, had invented a decade earlier.
