Scientists Demo New Nanoprinting Tech with Microscopic Golden Olympic Logos [Teeny Tiny]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/365565379/scientists-demo-new-nanoprinting-tech-with-microscopic-golden-olympic-logos

Scientists at Norwestern University have demonstrated their new nano-printing technology by mass-producing the Beijing Olympics emblem 15,000 times, each logo so small the whole print run fits inside one square centimeter. 2,500 of the images, made of thousands of 90 nanometers dots, would fit on a grain of rice. The polymer pen lithography uses an array of millions of tiny flexible polymer "pens" that can be used to scribe marks on various different nano-scales, and in this case deposit "ink" made of 16-mercaptohexadecanoic acid onto a gold substrate (what else would do, in Olympic season?) The team thinks that the technique, which can print out tiny dot-matrix imagery, will find uses in computational tools, medical diagnostics and the pharmaceutical industry. The study is published today in Science Express. [Physorg]