Vroom! Vroom! Making a toy car the size of a grain of rice calls for nimble fingers and ingenious tools. But scaling its motor down to the size of a few dozen atoms is in another league. This past September chemists at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and at Tohoku University in Japan reported in Nature that they had synthesized a working motor from just fifty-eight atoms. Even when bound into a molecule, atoms often remain free to rotate about their interatomic bonds. If that motion were continuous and predictable, engineers might be able to harness it for doing useful work.
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