A pair of nanomaterials scientists has created the world’s smallest pipette, one that dispenses droplets as tiny as a billion-trillionths of a liter. Made from germanium nanowires with an alloy tip, the pipette has an outer shell of crystalline carbon. And it expels volumes so minuscule that at one-drop per second, it would take 950 billion years to fill a shot glass. Besides being a cool feat, the pipette–reported online 15 April in Nature Materials–has allowed researchers to understand how liquids solidify on a smaller scale than was previously possible.
