Trekkies will love this, fabricated by awesome designers Takayuki Hoshino & Shinji Matsui, this scale model of the legendry Starship Enterprise NCC-1701D is about 8.8 micrometers long. There are 1000 micrometers in 1 millimeter just in case you’re wondering. That’s fantastic and the method used is even more fascinating and quite complicated to for those of us who aren’t rocket scientists. The designers have scaled this model down to one-billionth scale by 30 kV Ga+ focused-ion- beam CVD using phenanthrene gas. They apparently did this for ‘The 47th International Conference on Electron, Ion and Photon Beam Technology and Nanofabrication Bizarre/Beautiful Micrograph Contest’ back in 2003.

[Nerdesque]