Saturday, December 29, 2007

A Bible smaller than a pin!

The smallest Bible ever made is smaller than a pinhead: 0.5 millimetres square.

On that space scientists from Technion, an Israeli technological Institute transferred the 30,428 words of the entire Old Testament. It is a vowelled-Hebrew copy

The nano-Bible was developed from an idea by Uri Sivan, head of the Nanotechnology Institute. The project was managed by physics' doctoral student Ohad Zohar. This is the world's tiniest Bible," Zohar said. "The Guinness Book of World Records has a Bible 50 times bigger”.

The scientists now want to take pictures of the miniature Bible and blow it up to a seven-by-seven metre (yard) poster, which will make it "possible to read the entire Bible with the naked eye”.

The goal for the future is to inscribe data on various biomolecules such as DNA. The large 10-million-bit text was chosen for its size. Project creator Uri Sivan: "The nano-Bible project was aimed at displaying the miniaturization ability we have."

The nano-Bible was written on a silicon surface covered with a 20 nanometer layer of gold.

"When we send the tiny particle beam, called gallium ions, toward a point on the surface, the gold atoms bounce off of this point, thus exposing the silicon layer underneath. The diameter of the exposed point is about 40 nanometers. When we look at the written example using a scanning electron microscope, the exposed silicon point looks darker than the gold surrounding it. By sending a particle beam towards various points on the substrate, we can etch any pattern of points, especially one that represents text," said Ohad Zohar.

The structure of the nano-Bible was built using a special computer program developed in the project's framework, which enables etching text on the surface layer.

The nano-Bible project is part of an educational program that asks the following question: "How small can the Bible be?"

The program uses this intriguing question in order to investigate modern methods of creating miniature structures and imaging on a nanometric scale, to present advanced technology for high-density information storage and to discuss future topics such as information storage using DNA molecules or other bio-molecules.

The picture show a modern ‘tiny’ Bible – the nano-bible is too small to be seen with the naked eye.
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