Armed with a powerful microscope, Sumio Iijima aims to build a new world. He's a leading researcher in nanotechnology, the burgeoning field of creating novel materials and devices by using atoms and molecules as building blocks. Working at NEC Corp.'s central research laboratories north of Tokyo, lijima in 1991 discovered an exotic form of carbon, a cigar-shaped molecule called a carbon nanotube. Now, he's manipulating strands of another new carbon material that he found in 1998: curved, conical tubes dubbed nanohorns.
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