The delightful video below, A Boy And His Atom, is considered the world's smallest stop-motion film. Back in 2013, IBM researchers created the film as a demonstration of a scanning tunneling microscope's capability as a basic tool for nanotechnology, a "bottom-up" approach to engineering in which individual atoms or molecules are positioned to build tiny machines. (The prefix nano refers to the scale of a nanometer, one-billionth of a meter.) A scanning tunneling microscope (STM) uses a sharp, conductive tip to scan a surface at the atomic level by detecting tunneling current as the tip moves close to a surface. By precisely controlling the tip's position and applying small voltage pulses, the STM can pick up and move individual atoms across the surface.
In this case, the nanoscientists used the STM "to move thousands of carbon monoxide molecules (two atoms stacked on top of each other), all in pursuit of making a movie so small it can be seen only when you magnify it 100 million times."
Also below is a "making of" video.
Previously:
• Plants embedded with nanotechnology to make them glow, and they can be recharged!
