DailyDirt: There's Plenty Of Room At The Bottom...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Kids of all ages are entertained by toys that are just smaller versions of everyday items -- eg. toy cars, model trains, tiny dollhouses, etc. Most kids outgrow this fascination with small things when they get bigger, but some folks don't. Plenty of adults work on building small, intricate designs... that can be artwork or technology. Here are just a few examples of people using their imaginations to create almost incredibly tiny worlds that everyone should be able to appreciate.

• Akiko Ida and Pierre Javelle took some photographs of ordinary things and added tiny sculptures to create amusing scenes. Hmm. Did they get permission to create their very small Batman scene? [url]
• Willard Wigan makes micro-sculptures from random bits of lint and debris. Just another example of creating some things of value out of bits of nothing. [url]
• IBM holds the record for the world's smallest stop-motion film, verified by Guinness World Records, made with a scanning tunneling microscope. The movie, A Boy And His Atom, features carbon monoxide molecules arranged on a copper surface to depict a boy playing with an atom. It's not really a riveting story, but it's a fun way to show off how matter can be physically manipulated at the atomic scale. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: akiko ida, artists, guinness world records, microscopic sculptures, nanotechnology, pierre javelle, scanning tunneling microscope, scientists, stm, willard wigan
Companies: ibm