Japanese scientists create microscopic noodle bowl using nanotechnology

Mari Yamaguchi, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
TOKYO - Engineers in Japan have created a noodle bowl so small it can only be seen through a microscope.

Mechanical engineering professor Masayuki Nakao and his students at the University of Tokyo created the tiny bowl in a project aimed at developing nanotube-processing technology.

Nakao says it has a diameter of just one-thousandth of a millimetre.

The Japanese-style ramen bowl was carved out of microscopic nanotubes.

Nanotubes are tube-shaped pieces of carbon, measuring about one-ten-thousandth of the thickness of a human hair.

Carbon nanotubes are being explored for a wide range of uses in electronics and medicine because their structure endows them with powerful physical properties such as strength greater than steel.

The microscopic bowl was first created in December 2006, but the experiment was only disclosed Thursday after being entered in a microphotography competition last week.

The ramen bowl experiment included a string of "noodles" that measured one-five-hundredth of a millimetre in length, with a thickness of one-50,000th of a millimetre.

"We believe it's the world's smallest ramen bowl, with the smallest portion of noodles inside, though they are not edible," Nakao said.

The hardest part was to keep the noodles from rising upright from the bowl "like alfalfa sprouts," he said.

"The achievement was mostly for fun," he added.

The Canadian Press, 2008