A nanotechnologist has created the world’s smallest and most plentiful smiley, a tiny face measuring a few billionths of a metre across assembled from strands of DNA.
Dr Paul Rothemund at the California Institute of Technology can make 50 billion smileys, each a thousand times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, with his technique.
Rothemund has been working on flat, two-dimensional shapes but says that 3D structures in DNA should be quite feasible with this technique.
One application would be a nano-scale ‘cage’ in which pharmaceutical researchers, working on novel drugs, could sequester enzymes until they were ready for use in turning other proteins on and off.
Cool.
What does he do – knit them? The double helix look a little like yarn…
That ain’t no smiley!
That’s a frickin’ skull!
This is just cool.
I wonder if walmart will sue, it a yellow smilly face, don’t they have a tradmark on that now. Sorry I am just being a jerk here. but.
It is a spooky looking thing.
Jack o’Lantern!
It’s not the Walmart,… MS is the one who have patented it for the Messenger…
That looks just plain evil.