An engineering team at Harvard University has managed to create “nano-gardens” that are the size of pennies, where each flower is only as large as a strand of hair.
To “grow” these nanogardens, the engineers dipped a glass beaker in silicon and barium chloride—the miniscule flowers appeared soon after.
They used carbon dioxide to make the petals and leaves ripple, and lowered the temperature to make the blossoms thicker.
Wim Noorduin, the brain behind this project, tries to make these “flowers” appear as realistic as possible by adding colors to them with Photoshop as the electron microscopes do not photograph in color.
They may not be genuine flowers, but these microscopic blooms are still very pretty to look at—see more of them below:
[via NPR]