A 30-micron boat, smaller than you can imagine

2020-11-10

Recently, Researchers have created the world's smallest boat, measuring just 30 microns in length, so small it could sail along a human hair.

A team from Leiden University used an electron microscope and a high-resolution 3D printer to carry out the imaging and then built the boat as part of a study into the potential design of vehicles that could potentially travel inside the human body. Carrying out drug treatments is one of examples.

It is a miniature copy of the "Benchy" boat, a test structure often used to test the effectiveness of 3D printers.

"We focused the laser inside the droplet," Daniela Kraft, a physicist at the University of the Netherlands, told CNN. "If we move the laser through the droplet, we will write the structure we want," she explained. "For example, if we move it into a spiral, then we are writing a spiral."