A boy and his atom - A tiny video by IBM

IBM has made the world's smallest stop animation video, it runs about one minute, and features - you guessed it a boy and his atom. That is the mundane part of this achievement, the amazing part is, as Io9 states, "Each frame of the IBM video measures a paltry 45 x 25 nanometers. A single inch measures 25 million nanometers across. Putting that into perspective, one nanometer is a thousandth of a thousandth of the size of a piece of rice. So, it would take about 1,000 frames of the film laid side-by-side to extend across a single human hair."

Researchers over at IBM used a scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of carbon monoxide molecules in order to achieve this video which is only viewable at a magnification of 100 million times!



IBM says that they developed the atomic-manipulation technique partly in pursuit of more efficient storage technologies, which could one day lead to extreme storage solutions, potentially storing all the movies ever made on an object the size of a fingernail.