World's Tiniest Movie Uses Atoms As Actors
Still from "A Boy and His Atom" IBM Research"A Boy and His Atom" is the must-see film of the year. Scientists at IBM Research have just earned a Guinness world record for the smallest movie ever: They created a stop-motion film by moving atoms, one at a time, across a copper surface. The result is the sweet story of a boy named Atom, who befriends a single atom and then goes dancing, plays catch and jumps on a trampoline. To make the 242-frame film, principle investigator Andreas Heinrich and his team used a two-ton scanning tunneling microscope, cooled to -450 degrees Fahreinheit, to magnify the atoms more than 100 million times. The scanning tunneling microscope isn't an optical microscope. A robot arm moves a tiny needle (its tip is a single atom) across the copper surface in a scanning pattern, "like an old-fashioned TV tube," Heinrich explains. The needle...