While there’s no shrink ray in existence as of yet, scientists are hard at work at making magazines available for us, just in case we ever get down to the micrometer scale. In fact, a laboratory in Switzerland has managed to print an image so small that you could fit over 2,000 of them onto a single grain of salt. If they were to do this, the title of this article would be called “4,000 pandas on a grain of salt.”
The scientists from IBM Research carved a miniscule 11×14-micrometer image of a recent cover of National Geographic KIDS Magazine onto a polymer. The process they used is akin to 3D printing, but on a smaller scale. They used a heatable silicon tip that was 100,000 times smaller than the tip of a pencil point to chisel the image. While it certainly took years of development to create such a machine, the actual magazine cover was output in less than two minutes.
Be sure to watch the video below to see how the team created this incredibly tiny magazine cover:
It’s definitely interesting to see how small things can get. At least we’ll have stuff to read if we ever get shrunk down to this size.