In 1989 scientist Wayne Szalinski creating a shrinking ray wich accidentally miniaturized his children and the kids next door in the movie ‘Honey, I Shrunk The Kids.’
Nearly 30 years have passed and such a feat seems to be possible, as demonstrated by a group of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the United States, who “discovered” how to shrink objects using a laser.
Although the idea of shrinking people as they did in ‘Honey, I Shrunk The Kids’ appeared to be very science fiction at the time, now experts are considering the real possibility of reducing nanoscale objects from “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation” (Laser) .
From this advance of the scientific community, one could take any simple structure and reduce it 1,000 times its original size. The professor of neurotechnology Edward Boyden, MIT’s principal investigator, aims to achieve what for years was a science fiction thing: “invent better equipment to make smaller nanomaterials”.
“There are all kinds of things you can do with this” from the so-called “implosion fabrication”.
The invention seems to come out of the Hollywood culture, and could be, if you consider the films like Antman, Tron, and Star Wars, all had the use of lasers, a source of inspiration in the cinema and a test of how fascinating science can be.
This achievement means for researchers a portal for the “development of smaller microscopes and cell phone lenses and even the creation of small robots that improve daily life”.
Also, scientists are exploring the application of this knowledge in the field of health, looking for ways to add small robotic particles to anti-cancer drugs that only search for cancer cells and destroys them.
MIT engineers have devised a way to create 3-D nanoscale objects by patterning a larger structure with a laser and then shrinking it. This image shows a complex structure prior to shrinking.
Image: Daniel Oran
The surprising thing about this is that to achieve this goal, to reduce the size of things, scientists use a laser beam and an absorbent gel (commonly used in baby diapers), according to BBC.
The procedure is, according to BBC, similar to writing with a 3D pen. Then, they can join any material (metal, DNA or small particles of “quantum dots”) to the structure. Finally, they shrink the structure into a tiny size.
The process also includes injecting a material into the gel and then enlarging it to make it easier to see.
“It looks a bit like the film of a photograph (…) A latent image is formed by exposing a sensitive material in the gel to light. Then, you can bring that latent image to the real world by adding other material,” researcher Daniel Oran told CNN .
Previously, similar lasers had been able to make only two-dimensional objects, while other forms of shrinking three-dimensional structures were slower and more difficult to recreate in most laboratories.
