The world’s smallest car

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And you thought a clown car was small! Scientists have created a molecular “car” that is about 4 nanometers across (to put that into perspective, it’s 20,000 times thinner than a human hair!). This technology may one day be useful, but for now, it’s nothing more than an experiment.

Using the parts inside a single molecule, scientists have constructed the world’s smallest car. It has a chassis, axles and a pivoting suspension. The wheels are buckyballs, spheres of pure carbon containing 60 atoms apiece. It’d be a real squeeze to take it for a spin, however. The whole car is no more than 4 nanometers across. That’s slightly wider than a strand of DNA. A human hair is about 80,000 nanometers thick.

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