Nano Snowman
This is the teeniest tiniest snowman ever built in the history of universe ever ever ever. Are you totally ready to be geeked out? Good.
David Cox is a nanotech expert, and he made this snowman out of two tiny beads of tin welded together with platinum. Then he used a focused ion beam to carve the happy face. He finished by bathing everything in blue light. Doesn’t it totally look wintry?
The tiny beads Dr. Cox used are used to calibrate electron microscopes. Electron microscopes! The things you use to zoom in so much on things until you don’t even recognize what you’re looking at! Like this…
(photo source)
…that’s pollen!
Anyway, I digress. Altogether, the snowman is about one-fifth the width of a human hair. Of a human hair!
In other semi-related holiday news, check out these absolute MUST HAVES for this holiday season. Hehe.
All nano snowman photos by David Cox.
(via dvice)
Marilyne
December 21, 2009One of the biggest disappointments of my youth was to get my snowman covered by snow and that it was then impossible to see/recognize it. I hope he can rembember where he put his, because I feel like it won’t even take a snowflake to cover it up! :O