The world's smallest abacus was built by scientists at the IBM Research Division's Zurich laboratory using individual molecules with a diameter of less than one nanometer as beads. Click for an animation. A spider mite, which is not visible to the human eye, crawls across a mirror assembly, a part used in micromachines manufactured by Sandia National Laboratories. Each of its six silicon strings is an amazing 100 atoms wide. It was made by researchers at the Cornell University Nanofabrication Facility to illustrate just how tiny mechanical devices can get.
Nanotechnology is the science of the small.
Derived from the Greek word for dwarf, nano is a one-billionth unit of measurement. So a nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and a virus is nearly 100 nanometers across. Top-down or mechanical nanotechnology will have the greatest impact on our everyday lives in the near future. Cornell is one of five nanofabrication facilities in the country funded by the National Science Foundation. Perhaps less immediately useful, but equally important is the work being done by bottom-up scientists such as Nadrian Seeman, a structural chemist at New York University.