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A Boy And His Atom

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American



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Video of the Week #90, May 1st, 2013: From:World's Smallest Stop Motion Movie Made with Atoms! by Joanne Manaster at PsiVid and IBM Movie Does Claymation-in Atomic Scale by Larry Greenemeier at Observations. Source: IBM on YouTube. IBM took the challenge of moving 5,000 atoms around in order to create a short stop motion video, capturing the images using a scanning tunneling microscope. "The ability to move single atoms -- the smallest particles of any element in the universe -- is crucial to IBM's research in the field of atomic memory. IBM researchers used a scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of carbon monoxide molecules (two atoms stacked on top of each other), all in pursuit of making a movie so small it can be seen only when you magnify it 100 million times.