Imagine what could be done with machines.as small as those inside a living cell, whose components consist of individual molecules and are measured in nanometres, or millionths of a millimetre. We could yet have a computer that fits inside a shirt button or health monitors that circulate in our bloodstream. Back in 1959 Richard Feynman, a physicist at California Institute of Technology, was the first to challenge his colleagues to "think nano". Until then, scientists had two ways of looking at the world: they could study things on the the atomic scale using very big machines, such as particle accelerators, or on the microscopic scale, but in between, they could see virtually nothing.
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