Sometimes nanotechnology is used for good, sometimes just for silly. Scientists in England have created the world's smallest snowman. It follows along with the smallest book, musical instrument and even US flag. The world's smallest snowman was made by sticking two beads together using a little bit of platinum which is used a lot in nanotechnology to bond other metals together. Then they carved a pair of eyes and a mouth using an ion beam which is usually used to etch nanometer-sized holes and trenches into metals. They put this snowman on a tiny cantilever that used to image very small objects.
There is a neat video shows you how big (or small) this little snowman really is.
Happy holidays.
CryoEM can be used to look at the structure of a 7 nm self-assembled DNA tetrahedron, which is an incredible achievenment for scientists. Never before has such a small biological molecule been looked at with such high resolution!
Let this new crawling vacuum introduced by Panasonic do all the dirty work! It's called Fukitorimushi, which means "Wipe-up Bug" in japanese. Working with textile maker Teijin, they have developed an autonomous floor-cleaning robot that crawls around like an inchworm. The robot is covered in a super-absorbent polyester nanofiber cloth that picks up microscopic dust and residue that ordinary vacuums leave behind.
On a piece of germanium, platinum atoms heated under a very high vacuum, which causes them to form dimer chains. Platinum dimers are structures that consist of two platinum atoms linked together. When electrons are injected into the platinum dimers using a scanning tunneling microscope tip, the atom pairs can switch to as many as six different configurations!
So how does it work? The dye is made up of tiny plastic nanoparticles. When the glucose is low, the particle is yellow and fluorescent, but when glucose levels increase, the fluorescence goes away and the particles turn purple. Though this tattoo would have to be periodically re-injected because it would shed along with the skin, it's a major step up from the daily needle pricks!
Though it has long been known that microorganisms become airborne and travel great distances, this is the first study that analyzes their influence on cloud formation. Researchers have found that the ice crystal residues were half made up of mineral dust and a third were made up of inorganic ions mixed with nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon - the signature elements of biological matter. 
The Monash's team of scientists are modeling the pizza toss mathematically, and have found that tossing pizza dough continuously without stopping to catch it requires your hands to move in circles. This model could help researchers design better ultrasonic motors, which operate on similar principles as pizza tossing. In the future, these tiny motors could be used in minimally invasive neuro-microsurgery procedures, giving surgeons more control and precision during brain surgery.
For the cathode, these genetically engineered viruses are built to coat themselves with iron phosphate, then self-assemble onto carbon nanotbues to create a network of highly conductive material. These viruses are a common bacteriophage, which infect bacteria but art harmless to humans.
Scientists have developed special polymer films to improve the transfer of the fingerprint from the crime scene surfaces to the laboratory. This new polymer is conjugated with highly fluorescent particles so that interaction with oil would cause swelling and increased fluoresence intensity. This allows fingerprints to show up more clearly. Below are two fluorescent images showing (a) a fingerprint transferred to a polymer film from a glass surface and (b) the same fingerprint image after digital contrast enhancement.
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