Back in 2005, I posted about Rice University chemists who had made nanocars that are just a few nanometers across. (A human hair is about 80,000 nanometers in diameter.) Over at Wired Science, Aaron Rowe updates us on the research. From Wired Science:
By putting the cars on a glass slide, and using a… a hacked fluorescence microscope the team was able to see them moving around at room temperature, says Stephan Link, a chemist who led the study, published in the journal ACS Nano.
To verify that the carborane – carbon and boron – wheels actually turn, the researchers built some nano-tricycles and compared them to the cars. The triangles remained stationary, presumably because each of their wheels points in a different direction.