Scientists give the strangest birthday gifts. I might be happy with a new fuel-saving car or even an electronic wallet, but apparently that's not enough for the chemist Martyn Poliakoff (photo). For his birthday, the folks over at the the University of Nottingham’s Nanotechnology and Nanoscience Center (NNNC) engraved the periodic table of elements onto a single hair from Poliakoff.
Using a beam of gallium ions to carve, the NNNC's researchers were able to craft one of the smallest periodic table of elements in the world in just seconds. Gallium ions are typically used to repair damage to microscopic structures in semi-conductors, according to Singularity Hub.
They used it for a slightly different purpose this time, but the effect is still the same. Each symbol on the periodic table is four microns tall, or in other words, it would take 250,000 of these symbols stacked on top of each other to reach a single meter. The entire periodic table of elements engraved on his hair. was just 88 microns wide, and 46 microns tall, so there's room for thousands of tiny periodic tables on his hair.
Poliakoff and a team of videographers even went through the hassle of videotaping the whole thing and uploading it to YouTube, and it really is worth a view:
If you want to get even more Poliakoff (and who doesn't, really?), he and some of his friends created a video series about the entire Periodic Table of Elements, all 118 elements included. So, if you have plenty of free time and want to recreate the experience of a college chemistry lecture (again, who doesn't?), your day is set.
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Tags: Chemistry, Nanomaterials, Nanotech
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