The Sub-Sub-Sub-Sub-Compact (It's A Ricer)
Researchers at Rice University have developed and successfully built the world’s smallest car. It has a chassis, axles and a pivoting suspension. The whole car is no more than 4 nanometers across. No idea how small that is? It’s slightly wider than a strand of DNA. A human hair is about 80,000 nanometers thick. You can build a 20,000 lane highway for these cars on a strand of hair.
Other have tried making nanoscale objects that look like a car. But this is the first one that rolls “on four wheels in a direction perpendicular to its axles,” Newsoxy reports.
Now, researchers want to put the diminutive car to good use. “We’d eventually like to move objects and do work in a controlled fashion on the molecular scale,” said James Tour, a Rice University researcher who co-led the work. Eventually the researchers want to build tiny trucks that could carry atoms and molecules around in miniature factories.
Law enforcement is already alarmed: If you want to watch the car, you need to use a scanning tunneling microscope –otherwise it’s invisible. Not word on top speed, mpg, or price.
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Yeah, well, give it a couple of model years and it'll be six nanometers across, and weigh 1/10*10^23 grams more. And I bet they'll decontent it, too.
Make it a station wagon with manual transmission and I will buy it!
I'm disappointed. Where is "what, no Hemi?"