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Detroit: President-elect Barack Obama is larger than life these days. Except, that is, at the University of Michigan, where he has become remarkably small.
A team of researchers has created carbon nanotube images of Obama whose details can only be seen with optical and electron microscopes.
"I really didn't mean it in a political way," said John Hart, assistant professor in mechanical engineering and leader of the research team at Michigan.
"It was really for fun. It was a basic demonstration of what we can do with nanotubes." Hart said he hopes the interest in "nanobama" gives the public a better understanding of nanotechnology research and its applications.
Each of the millions of hollow carbon cylinders that make up the incoming president's image is tens of thousands times smaller than a human hair, but stronger than steel.
Patterns arranged in the shapes of Obama face are made of metal catalyst nanoparticles.
The nanotubes are "grown" like forests of trees on the patterns by 1,000 degree-plus heat in a chemical reaction.
The images include a "nanobama" flag and "nanobama" blocks. There's even a "nanobiden" image of the incoming vice-president, Joe Biden.
The idea behind "nanobama" came to Hart about six months ago, but he and his team didn't do anything with it until just before the election. It took about two days of work on their off-time to "grow" and photograph the nanotube images, and download them onto his website, www.nanobama.com, Hart said.
Most of the 50,000 hits to the site came after Obama's November 4 victory over Republican Senator John McCain.
"Having fun with something like this is important to maintaining a creative culture," he said.
Other famous nanoscale etchings and objects include a US flag, guitar and a silicon chip consisting of nearly 300,000 saxophone images, created by Cornell University for inclusion at the Bill Clinton Presidential Library.
The idea behind what would become nanotechnology was suggested by physicist Richard Feynman in 1959 in his classic talk, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom".
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