Object compression is now possible

A group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed a way to quickly and relatively inexpensively reduce objects to nanoscale. This process is called process implosion. According to a publication in the journal Science, it uses the absorbent properties of a polymer called polyacrylate.

Using this technique, scientists create the shapes and structures they want to shrink by modeling the polymer scaffold with a laser. The elements to be recovered, such as metals, quantum dots or DNA, are attached to the scaffold by fluorescein molecules that bind to the polyacrylate.

Removing moisture with acid reduces the size of the material. In experiments done at MIT, material attached to polyacrylate shrank evenly to a thousandth of its original size. Scientists emphasize, first of all, the cheapness of this technique of "shrinkage" of objects.