Now THIS is a GeekCraft: A Boy And His Atom: The World’s Smallest Movie

Okay, so you need a $214 BILLION company to sponsor you to make one of these for yourself, but this is pixel art at its most tiny, and science at its most frivolous.

IBM this week released their mini stop-motion movie made using atoms. Yep, those dots acting as pixels are carbon monoxide molecules – two stacked carbon atoms – which have been manipulated frame-by-frame to create a story about a boy and his atom. It took a small team two weeks to complete using a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM), which uses quantum physics to move atoms and molecules around. The video has earned IBM a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for creating the teeniest tiniest stop motion film.

Want to know more? Watch the second film all about how they made it: Moving Atoms: Making The World’s Smallest Movie

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