I am quite sure that having a theoretical shrink ray gun would make plenty of sense, and it would definitely be practical to use, assuming one can reverse the shrinking at a later time. Transportation woes would have been sorted out by then, although shipping companies might find themselves to be out of business. Back to the issue at hand – the world’s smallest magazine cover has been created in a laboratory in Switzerland, where 2,000 of such covers can actually fit on a grain of salt.
This is one particular magazine cover that no one would like to grace, after all, who else walking by will be able to get a look at your face? You would need some sort of optical equipment that has adequate power to reveal what the magazine cover looks like. The scientists behind this cover have carved the 11×14-micrometer image of a couple of pandas on polymer, which is the very same image that was depicted on last month’s cover of the National Geographic Kids magazine
The kind of technology is similar to that of 3D printing, and Urs Duerig, a scientist at IBM in Switzerland and one of the inventors of the machine, shared, “My idea was to do something similar to chiseling a rock, but just to do it on a nano-scale.”
This particular device is more or less the size of a family refrigerator, where it makes use of a small chisel that has a heatable silicon tip that is 100,000 times smaller than a sharpened pencil point, cutting out the intended image. We can’t wait to see just how much farther the field of nanotechnology will bring mankind in the future.
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