As magnetic resonance imaging technology becomes more and more sensitive, some researchers are setting their sights on the nanoscale. Two independent teams of scientists--one in Germany, the other in California-- have recently been successful locating hydrogen atoms via nuclear magnetic resonance in samples mere nanometers across.
"I want to push NMR and MRI to the molecular level," says Friedemann Reinhard, a physicist at Germany's University of Stuttgart and leader of one of the studies.
Read more about the studies in an article entitled Diamond-Based Quantum Devices Shrink MRI to Nanoscale, published today in Scientific American.