DNA origami

[Sabre]

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Technology really is shrinking the globe. In a map of the Americas unveiled in this week's Nature1, the journey from Los Angeles to New York becomes a hop of just tens of nanometres. That's a scale of 1:200,000,000,000,000.

The entire western hemisphere is smaller than a bacterium, and 50 billion copies of the chart could fit inside a drop of water. This might seem tiny, but the map, which is made of DNA, is the biggest and most elaborate nanoscale object created in the lab so far.

Yet its cartographer, Paul Rothemund from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, is not satisfied. "I had wanted to make a map of the entire world, but I didn't have enough time," he says. "I feel terrible about it."