For a long time, the pursuit of greatness consumed much of the world. It still does, in many ways. Just look at the massive Burj Khalifa in Dubai, rising 2,717 feet. The world loves big. But the opposite end of the scale is also fascinating. The smaller we can make something, the more exciting it becomes. And if the tiny thing still works, at least in theory, it’s even more exciting. Plus, the implications for everything from healthcare to electronics and computing can’t be underestimated. The smaller we can make things like power supplies and data storage devices, the more efficient, powerful, and faster the computers of the future will be. Let’s take a look at ten of the smallest, most amazing things ever created.
10 Smallest Airplanes in the World
Stratolaunch — the largest aircraft ever built . Designed to launch rockets, it had a wingspan of 385 feet. This is very significant and shows that we can continue to make planes bigger if we know what we are doing from an engineering standpoint. So how small can a plane be?
Back in 1952, Ray Stits created what was for many years the smallest functional airplane ever built. Known as the Sky Baby, it had a wingspan of 7 feet 2 inches and a length of 9 feet 10 inches. It held the record for smallest airplane until 1984, when Ray's son Don usurped his father's title by creating the Baby Bird It had a wingspan of 6 feet 3 inches and weighed more than 200 pounds. less than his father's plane. It still holds the world record for the smallest monoplane.
Not to be outdone, Robert Starr helped the elder Stits build the Sky Baby, but felt he wasn't getting enough credit, so he built his own plane, called the Bumblebee. It was completed in 1984, just in time for the Baby Bird to break the world record. Starr went back to the drawing board and made Bumblebee II .
Since Bumblebee is a biplane, it holds a separate and distinct record for being the smallest. Its wingspan was only 5 feet 6 inches, and Starr piloted it himself.
9. The smallest gun in the world
While it's not always the case, it's a general assumption that the bigger the gun, the more powerful it is. There's obviously some wiggle room in terms of ammunition, barrel size, and so on. But a snubnose revolver isn't going to do as much damage as a big-bore hunting rifle. A smaller gun will have a smaller caliber, use smaller bullets, and probably do less damage. And at some point, a gun can become so small that it's questionable how it can do anything at all. That's the case with Swiss Mini Gun C1ST .
At just two inches long and weighing less than an ounce, the gun is fully capable of firing .34mm rounds. The barrel is less than an inch long, and the weapon is actually banned in the U.S. because it is apparently too easy to conceal.
The company makes about 100 pieces a year, especially custom ones, since they must be handcrafted to exacting standards if they are to function and do so safely. They cost over $6,000, if you're wondering (though you can pay more to get one in 18-karat gold).
A 9mm bullet will travel at about 370 meters per second . That's over 1,200 feet per second. The SwissMiniGun fires at about 400 feet per second , so the overall power is understandably much less impressive. Its penetrating power is less than a foot-pound, and it is unlikely, though not impossible, that it could even poke you in the eye.
8. The smallest hard drives in the world
Computing is one of those areas where we're always trying to shrink. More memory, more speed, less space. That's what everyone wants. To do that effectively, we need smaller and smaller hard drives. Right now the smallest of that , what we were able to produce were 2 and 4 GB hard drives from Toshiba, measuring only 0.85 inches .
It is worth noting that this hard drive is the smallest practical hard drive that can be used and installed inside real equipment. But in 2017, IBM released a smaller hard drive in a technical sense. One bit of data was stored on a magnetic surface measuring only 1 atom Strictly speaking, this made it the smallest hard drive that will likely ever be created.
7. Praying Mantis-Sized 3D Glasses
Do you know how we see the world in three dimensions? The exact mechanism is not easy to explain and even more difficult to reproduce. For example, how to make a robot see in three dimensions? Or create artificial eyes for humans who can master depth perception?
Scientists studying how 3D vision works studied it in praying mantises. To do this, they had to make tiny 3D glasses the size of a praying mantis . Why praying mantises? They are the only known invertebrates capable of see things in 3D . The way they do it is different from how it works for us. Praying mantises only focus on movement, so what they see isn't as important as the fact that they can see it moving. This could help create 3D vision in robotics and artificial intelligence.
6. Nano Bible
There are currently several hundred versions of the Bible in the world, but what they all have in common is that they are usually large enough to be read with the naked eye. This is not the case with Nano-Bibles There are 1.2 million words in the Bible, and scientists have managed to fit them all into a Bible the size of 0.04 square millimeters .
Although it looks like a speck of dust and fits easily on a pen, it is actually a silicon chip coated with gold. Each word was written using a focused ion beam generator, which bombarded the gold surface with gallium ions, creating the finest, tiniest calligraphy you’ve ever seen. The silicon layer it’s printed on is less than 100 atoms thick. To read it, the text must be magnified 10,000 times.
5. The smallest battery in the world
There aren't many things these days that require D batteries, but if you remember using them, or still have the odd object that takes them, you know how big and clunky they were. Reducing the number of batteries has made devices much smaller, lighter, and more portable. But the process is ongoing, and there's plenty of room for batteries to be further reduced. For example, scientists have managed to create a functional battery the size of a grain of sand .
These ultra-small batteries could power equally tiny computers. They would be ideal in wearable technology and especially implantable ones. medical devices , which should be as small as possible.
Made using a so-called Swiss-Roll process that twists layers of thin film, they are cost-effective and can power computers the size of a speck of dust for more than 10 hours.
4. 20-micrometer house
Researchers at the Femto-ST Institute in France have taken small-scale construction to a new level, creating what could be called the smallest home ever built. Despite a tiled roof, a chimney and seven windows, the length of the house is only 20 microns From some perspective, a human hair is typically about 70 microns .
The small house was built inside a vacuum chamber, and it took nanorobots to assemble it from quartz membranes in a style similar to making origami. The house doesn't necessarily serve a purpose. After all, there aren't many things small enough to fit inside. But it was a compelling demonstration of the techniques that can be used to create tiny structures.
3. The smallest guitar in the world
The smaller the instrument gets, the higher its pitch. The piccolo tends to hit higher notes than the flute. The ukulele just doesn't sound like a guitar. With that in mind, you can imagine what the world's smallest guitar would sound like if someone ever learned to play it.
Made from crystalline silicon, the world's smallest guitar has length of only 10 microns . It is about one-seventh the width of a human hair, or the equivalent of a red blood cell. It is made up of six strands, each only 50 nanometers or about 100 atoms in length.
Researchers at Cornell University have created a nano-guitar to demonstrate a technology that could have far-reaching implications in areas such as electronics and fiber optics. The best part is that you can actually play it. Of course, you’d have to use an atomic force microscope to do this, and the sound the strings make wouldn’t be audible, but it could still happen.
2. The smallest antenna in the world
If you want to send or receive radio signals, you need an antenna. Once upon a time, everyone who watched TV had an antenna on their roof, a sight that would probably baffle any member of Generation Z. But over the years, antennas, like any other technology, have become smaller, if not replaced entirely. A nanoantenna is the smallest of the small. It is made of DNA and20,000 times less human hair.
Researchers have created a five-nanometer antenna to monitor proteins rather than radio or TV signals. Its fluorescent structure means it can send and receive light signals, which is what the scientists who created it use. When the proteins it monitors move or change, it will reflect light in a different color, signaling to researchers that something has happened.
As far-fetched as it sounds, those conducting the research insist that part of the reason they used DNA was because it is so easy to use and program. They hope that in the future, the technology used to develop the antenna could help with everything from developing new drugs to nanomachines.
1. The smallest film in the world
We usually think of movies in terms of length. A 90-minute movie, a three-hour movie, etc. When a movie is big, it usually means it's released in IMAX format and formatted for the big screen. And on TV, movies are sometimes prefaced with a message that they've been shortened to better fit the screen. So, among these variables, what qualifies a movie as the world's smallest?
The smallest film in the world is called "The Boy and His Atom" . It was created by IBM Research and is a stop-motion animation created by manipulating atoms. To see it, the film must be magnified more than 100 million times.
The team used carbon monoxide molecules, each made up of two atoms, to tell a one-minute frame-by-frame story about a boy action figure and his single pet/toy molecule. The same team created the tiny 12-atom data store we mentioned earlier.
In fact, you can see the difference between the carbon atoms and the oxygen atoms in each molecule when you observe how one appears as a dark sphere and the other appears as a light sphere.
Despite the short film being an amazing exploration of data storage and processing at the atomic level, viewers only gave it a 6.8 rating out of 10 on IMDb Some critics are simply impossible to please.
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