National Geographic News, Reporting Your World Daily

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Photo: Nanotube Made into World's Smallest Radio


Email to a Friend	<< Back to Full Story

Over the past hundred years, radios have evolved from the wooden "cathedral" style radios of the 1930s (top left) to the pocket-size transistor radios of the 1950s (center) and more recently to the single-chip radios found in cell phones and wireless sensors (right).

Now researchers have further shrunk the radio into a single carbon nanotube that is 10,000 times smaller than a human hair (bottom).

Images courtesy Zettl Research Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California at Berkeley