Scientists build a miniscule house to show off nanorobotics
The micrometer house is fit for an amoeba.
Tiny homes are all the rage with hipsters, minimalists and those who just want to scale down to a simpler style of living. But some tiny homes are just too small even for the most ambitious house hunters.
This microhouse has a charing tiled-roof, side windows and more, but it's built on a foundation measuring 300 by 300 micrometers. The house itself is only about 20 micrometers long. One micrometer is 1/25,400th of an inch.
To understand how small that actually is, a dust mite is about three micrometers in size.
The unusual house was built by the Femto-ST Institute in Besancon, France, using a small robot that builds models from silica membranes via a vacuum chamber, and a dual beam scanning electron microscope combined in one platform called μRobotex.
The miniature home was built as part of a new study published in April to show off what the μRobotex platform can do.
The scientists behind the nanorobotics study are hoping to use μRobotex for more practical purposes in medicine and aerospace, according to the study.