tiny machine

Dartmouth College researchers have created a robot so small that 200 of them could fit on the tip of your finger. The tiny machine crawls like an inchworm across a grid at the breakneck speed of 200 microns per second. Its goal: to fix really little things. Dartmouth engineer Bruce Donald says swarms of such devices could one day repair circuitry in computer chips.

Hummingbirds: Day after day in warm weather they would zing up to the feeder outside my office window, and every time I saw one out of the corner of my eye I thought how nice it would be to get some good pictures. Nice, but not quite worth sitting motionless behind a lens for great chunks of time to get the perfect shot.