Free Republic

Researchers have installed a molecular engine into a "car" just a few billionths of a metre long. Measuring just 3 by 4 nanometres, around 20,000 of the cars could be parked on the tip of a human hair. Jim Tour and colleagues at Rice University in Houston, US, built a chassis and wheels for a nano-car from organic molecules at the end of 2005. The engineless model could only be powered remotely - using a heated gold surface to stop its wheels sticking and an electromagnetic field to drag it forwards. But the new model should be able to propel...

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. - The boys were halfway across a snowfield when the German airplane appeared. Their rifles, clumsily camouflaged, were sticking out of their backpacks. They stood frozen as the plane buzzed in tighter and tighter circles around them, wondering if they should run for the only possible shelter, a large boulder in the middle of the field. It might finally have been curtains for the Kavli boys, Fred and Aslak. "If we'd run, we would have been done for," Fred Kavli, 77, recalled recently, his head thrown back as he communed with memories of an adventurous youth in...