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Today, IBM released a stop-motion, animated short film called “A Boy And His Atom.”

Okay, so they made a stop motion movie. People do that on YouTube all the time. But what makes this a big deal is that the film was animated by precisely manipulating individual atoms themselves.

Researchers at IBM were able to accomplish this by using a scanning, tunneling electron microscope. This microscope, which has to be held at 268 degrees below zero Celsius and weighs two tons, is capable of magnifying atomic surfaces by 100 million times.

The atoms themselves are on a sheet of copper, and are physically manipulated with a needle being held about 1 nanometer over the surface. The needle is capable of attracting atoms and molecules and moving them into position.
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To create the movie, the scientists constructed 242 frames of still images, with each individual atom moved into its position. The still images were then put together and the music and other aspects were added.

In addition to creating the movie, the researchers at IBM have also created Star Trek-related images for the app related to the new move Star Trek: Into Darkness. The images are mostly exclusive to the app, but you can check out one of them below.

Okay, so scientists can animate atoms. While that’s intrinsically cool, why does it matter? Well, it matters because these techniques can be applied to practical technologies. For example, use of a scanning, tunnelling electron microscope enabled scientists to store a bit of computer data into only 12 atoms last year. On your computer, it takes about 1 million atoms to store that data.

“Research means asking questions beyond those required to find good short-term engineering solutions to problems. As data creation and consumption continue to get bigger, data storage needs to get smaller, all the way down to the atomic level,” said IBM researcher Andreas Heinrich in a press release. “We’re applying the same techniques used to come up with new computing architectures and alternative ways to store data to making this movie.”

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