It won’t fill you up, but it is a feast for the eyes (if you look through a microscope). This so-called “world’s smallest bowl of ramen” — a 1-micron (1/1000-mm, or 1/100th the width of a human hair) wide bowl containing dozens of 20-nanometer (1/50,000-mm) thick noodles — was created by University of Tokyo professor Masayuki Nakao as part of an effort to develop new carbon nanotube-based microcircuit fabrication technology. Nakao used a metal particle beam to carve the bowl from silicon, and he mixed up a soup of ethanol and catalyst inside the bowl to form the carbon nanotube “noodles.” According to Nakao, it was a major challenge to keep the bowl from overflowing. No word yet on how the tiny meal tastes.

[Source: Yomiuri]