10 Most Microscopic Things Ever Created
Do you know what nanopainting is? This technology creates sculptures smaller than one millimeter. Here are ten miniature things created by human hands. Among them are a microscopic snowman and a mini-Bible!
The snowman is made from two small beads of tin that have been welded together with platinum, the kind normally used to calibrate a microscope's electron lens. A focused beam of ions helped create the snowman's eyes and smile, and a tiny drop of platinum for the nose. It's the work of quantum particle detection team member Dr David Cox, who also took the picture.
The sculptures, less than 1mm tall, are made using a process called nanopainting. They are too small to be seen with the naked eye. They can only be seen under a microscope or in a photograph. Mr. Hurwitz used 3D printing technology in the production.
After spending months working on the fragments, he invited a 45-year-old photographer from Chichester, West Sussex, to photograph the sculpture under a microscope. Unfortunately, minutes after the photo shoot, Hurwitz's work was destroyed by a stray finger from a lab technician.
It would be difficult to read the Bible, but that’s not the point. Russell Berry, a nanotechnology researcher at an institute in Israel, engraved the Hebrew Bible on a chip the size of a grain of sugar to demonstrate the scale at which it can work. The “nano-Bible” is written on an ultra-thin silicon wafer, less than 100 atoms thick, coated with a layer of gold. To engrave the Hebrew letters, the researchers used the same focused ion beam, cutting away the unwanted layers of gold. By combining modern technology and ancient methods, the team called the process of engraving the chip “poetic beauty.” The nano-Bible is on display in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum.
The "Micro Thinker" stands 20 millionths of a meter tall and is about twice the size of a red blood cell. The tiny model even shows off its fingers and even muscles.
This is not a joke, this movie was actually created by moving single atoms around in a circle and filmed using a giant microscope.
IBM is exploring new possibilities for atomic-scale memory. Soon you'll be able to press play and meet the boy who befriended an atom.
Measuring just 10 by 7 micrometers (one micrometer is one thousandth of a millimeter), the bull is the smallest three-dimensional sculpture ever created.
David Smith, a railroad enthusiast from New Jersey, created this train with a simple craft knife and a steady hand.
The train is powered by a standard 51mm long rotating motor, which is cut from moulding plastic. It cost David just over £6 (455 roubles) to make his model train.
They created the flat origami structures by cutting thin plastic sheets, then grew cells to fill the seams of the tiny plates. Early work used animal connective tissue cells (which typically help heal wounds) to create the models; later work began using rat heart cells. Takeuchi and his colleagues hope the process will eventually help create artificial blood vessels, as well as other biological tissues.