Friday, October 21, 2005
Wow!
Fine, I'll admit it: I love gadgets. I have to keep myself from drooling in all those SkyMall catalogues (and Brookstone catalogues, and Hammacher Schlemmer catalogues, and so forth), all full of lovely gadgets I can't bring myself to buy. Sure, I might never use them, but they're so cool!
Thanks to Instapundit, we now have a viable entry for the World's Smallest Car:
Researchers at Rice University have created a "nanocar" measuring just 4 x 3 nanometers. It is slightly wider than a strand of DNA -- a human hair is about 80,000 nanometers thick. The car has a chassis, axles and a pivoting suspension. The wheels are buckyballs, spheres of pure carbon containing 60 atoms apiece.
Maybe I'm being unimaginative here... but it's hard to believe cars could be made any smaller. (Is there a round structure smaller than a Buckyball?)
In the meantime, I'm enjoying the vision of ten thousand of these little guys, drag-racing side by side along the length of a single human hair. (To math purists: yes, I'm allowing 4 nanometers' clearance between vehicles. I don't think that's too much to ask. Heck, sometimes it seems that Boston drivers miss me by nanometers.)
And no, I'm not going to even think about the cost of one of these... car molecules. (What should we call this substance, anyway? Automobilium?)
But still. Isn't that cool??
Okay, back to whatever you were doing before...
