National Geographic News, Reporting Your World Daily

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Photo: Nanotube Made into World's Smallest Radio


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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