IBM Creates World's Smallest Movie And ST Pics... Using Atoms

Hey, have you seen the new Atom Sandler film? We’re joking, of course, but the folks at IBM have created the world’s smallest movie, “A Boy and His Atom,” a short film that uses real atoms – carbon monoxide molecules – to tell the story of an atom boy playing with a single atom. The scientists utilized a massive tunneling microscope, operating at -268 Celsius, and moved the atoms frame by frame on a surface, then magnified it all 100 million times. To put it in perspective, if an atom were the size of an orange, an orange would be the size of Earth.

So, what’s this got to do with Star Trek? The IBM scientists also manipulated single atoms to form several very familiar shapes and images, including the Vulcan split-fingered greeting, the Enterprise and the Star Trek logo.

Cool, right?