Wow, is that small!!

In my last post I talked about some of the largest living things. Well it turns out that the small world is just as fascinating. To measure very small things scientists don't use centimeters they use Nanometers. A Nanometer is one billionth of a meter or to make that more understandable a human hair is about 100,000 nanometers wide. The smallest thing that you can see with an optical microscope is 500 times smaller than this or 200 nanometers. Are you getting this Cash??
So to 'see' things that are even smaller scientist use an Electron microscope and have taken many pictures of really neat stuff. The pictures of a flies foot was taken by an electron microscope. But scientists wanted to take pictures of even smaller things so they invented the Atomic Force Microscope. Look at the picture of the little pyramid and if you look closely you can see a small rod at the top of the pyramid. That is a carbon nanotube and it would take 50,000 of them to equal the width of a human hair. This moves across a surface and the movement 'takes' a picture that is smaller than any other microscope.