YOU ARE HERE: LAT HomeCollectionsAtoms  IBM team uses atoms to
create world's tiniest stop-motion movie  May 01, 2013|By
Deborah Netburn | This post has been corrected. Please see note
at bottom for details.  Talk about some tiny pixels: Researchers
at IBM have created the world's tiniest stop-motion animation
film by using single atoms to tell the story of a boy named Atom
and his friend, an atom.  The story is cute — Atom and his
friend dance together, jump together, get separated and then
reunite — but you will watch it in awe because each of the 242
frames has been magnified more than 100 million times, and what
you are really seeing are scientists manipulating one of the
squeensiest elements in the universe.  To move the atoms around,
the scientists used a scanning tunneling microscope, the same
piece of equipment they use to image atoms. Because atoms are so
tiny, you cannot see them using a regular light microscope, so
instead researchers view them by tracing their electric current
with a very tiny and