IBM Unveils World’s Tiniest Stop-Motion Film

IBM today unveiled the ‘first’ movie made out of atoms. One of the smallest elements in the universe stars in A Boy And His Atom, the world’s tiniest stop-motion film created at IBM Research’s San Jose lab. It was done by moving and manipulating atoms with an IBM-invented scanning tunneling microscope. The Nobel Prize-winning device “weighs two tons, operates at a temperature of negative 268 degrees Celsius, and magnifies the atomic surface over 100 million times”, IBM says. It moves atoms with a super-sharp needle that creates a precise sound that indicates how many positions have been shifted. Then a picture is taken — 242 of them to make this. The project is part of research into data storage on super-small scales. But it also is just really cool:

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