The idea of shrinking things down to a more convenient size seems so enticing. It’s a superpower for Ant-Man, kicks off the adventures in Honey I Shrunk the Kids, and, of course, the Simpsons had fun with the idea too. (Shrinkage has come up in other contexts, as well.)
Now, in real life, a team of MIT and Harvard scientists has gotten in on the fun by devising a new way of constructing nanomaterials — tiny machines or structures on the order of just a billionth of a meter. They call it Implosion Fabrication (ImpFab) and they do it by building the materials they want and then literally shrinking them down to the nanoscale. The findings appear today in the journal Science, and may pave the way for next-gen materials, sensors and devices.
Researchers have already been exploiting the nanoworld, of course, but the current methods of “nanofabrication” weren’t ideal. ...
