These are waves worth catching. Generating tiny swells in a dish of saline solution prompts beads, copper powder and even cells to assemble into a panoply of intricate patterns. The technique could offer a simple way to build elaborate microelectronics and make human tissue. Many attempts at small-scale construction build structures piece by piece, which can be time-consuming for complex products. Other methods can only use specific building blocks, such as magnetic materials. Now a team led by Utkan Demirci at Stanford University in California has found a way to quickly build structures a few millimetres across from almost anything, using a "liquid template".
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