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Apr 28
2010
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Well, ‘Men in Black’ got the point. According to the movie, there are planets with the size of a pendant, and maybe our earth is a pendant for other bigger aliens?
This time it’s IBM who has invented or much like created such a sand-size globe. It is the same earth globe you have seen in stores, but in different size. But what size? Haha … it’s a 0,3 millimeter size for its diameter and certainly you’ll need a loop to see it. This extra tiny globe has a great carving. Dr. Armin Knoll, a scientist of IBM Research in Zurich, who created this globe was actually using a microscopic etching technique to carve it in nanometer scale.
The size of the carving blade was 500 nanometer as used in electron microscope. The globe itself is made of glass molecules. And the materials for painting the map were made of various polymers, such as polyphtalalehyde found by Hiroshi Ito, an IBM scientist in 1980s. With all these materials and technology, it only needed 2 minutes and 23 seconds to make such a sand-size globe.
According to dr. Armin Knoll, the great progress in nanotechnology has a very close relationship with the methods and tools used to create nanometer-size object with high quality carving inside the object. That’s why he did this creation to prove his statement.
For me, this is quite ridiculous, for nobody will actually find a sand-size globe useful. Indeed it is quite an eye-ache to me. If I have the sand-size globe, I may have loose it in seconds, possibly flown by wind. And I won’t bother looking for it, it’s such a time wasting job. But Knoll has different point of view. This invention may be very useful in the future for chip development, medical to optical improvements. Who knows?
