This month, MIT researchers announced they invented a way to shrink objects to nanoscale -- smaller than what you can see with a microscope -- using a laser. That means they can take any simple structure and reduce it to one 1,000th of its original size.
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Here's how it works: Using a laser, researchers make a structure with absorbent gel -- akin to writing with a pen in 3D. Then, they can attach any material -- metal, DNA, or tiny "quantum dot" particles -- to the structure. Finally, they shrink the structure to a miniscule size.