Atoms

A team of physicists have just created the world's smallest working engine from a single electrically-charged atom. With an equivalent efficiency (if scaled to size) of an average automobile engine, it actually produces a significant amount of power

Researchers at ETH Zurich claim to have created both the world's smallest optical switch using a single atom, and accompanying circuitry that is smaller than the wavelength of the light that passes through it.

Scientists have successfully created a new super-heavy element called 117. The element matches some of the heaviest atoms ever observed and is around 40 percent heavier than a single atom of lead.

The Cesium 133 from Bathys Hawaii is the world's first true atomic wristwatch. Boasting an internal cesium atomic clock that's claimed to be accurate to one second over 1,000 years, the Cesium 133 is a rather expensive but utterly unique timepiece.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and JILA have unveiled the world's most precise timekeeper. The strontium lattice clock sets new standards for precision and stability, only gaining or losing one second about every five billion years.

With all the fuss over the recent influx of smartwatches, you'd think that a new wristwatch that simply displays the time on an analog face wouldn't cause much of a stir. However, when that watch is claimed to be "the world's most accurate wristwatch," people perk up and take notice.

For those who didn't know that physicists are really frustrated Pixar animators, it will be surprising to learn that scientists at IBM Almaden in California have produced the world’s smallest animated movie.

German scientists have created the world's smallest magnetic data storage unit, which can store one bit of information using 12 atoms.

Researchers involved in the ALPHA experiment at Switzerland's CERN facility have succeeded in trapping antimatter atoms for 1,000 seconds.

What if there existed a means of nuclear power generation with which these risks were drastically reduced?

The Chip Scale Atomic Clock is a matchbox-sized atomic clock, that uses one one-hundredth the power of its conventional counterparts.

Construction on IceCube, the world's largest neutrino observatory that is looking specifically for high-energy neutrinos, which are created in violent cosmic events such as super novae and gamma ray bursts, was completed last weekend.