Happy Birthday, Professor Martyn Poliakoff! Your lab-mates at the University of Nottingham’s Nanotechnology Centre have made you a birthday present.
By taking a single strand of Poliakoff’s hair (and a mighty head of hair he has) and subjecting it to a nano-etching technology, they managed to etch the entire periodic table onto a single strand of the hair. The entire thing is just 100 microns wide and 50 microns high. By irradiating the hair with ions of Gallium, tiny bits of the hair are flaked off, producing the microscopic table of elements.
I don’t know about you, but I’m going to need my reading glasses to see that for sure.
[via io9 via The Daily What]
