Don't make me nanocut you

Let's face it: there is really only one reason why nanotechnology is such a hot topic nowadays, and that is because "nano-" is the hippest prefix ever. It's terribly euphonic, its consonant repetition pleasing to our ears. Nano slides off the tongue easily, and the second syllable just sort of hangs there, yearing to be affixed to anything. And that's aside from the dimensions it refers to: just the word nano gives the reader a sense of the impossibly small, and impossibly small, as we've learned from every tech company ever, is awesome. Thus, now just about everything can be nano'd, though not all of it is really useful.

This one might be though. Doods and doodettes at NIST and CU-Boulder have developed the alliterative "Nanoknife," a sort-of cheese slicer that utilizes a material close to my heart as the cutting wire- carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes are only a couple of nanometers wide and are quite durable, thus the exhaustively internetty ranting about using them to build a Space Elevator. Utilizing a single nanotube grafted to tungsten needles, this nanoknife can potentially be used by biologists to cut very small slivers of cells with high accuracy. Have they actually tried to cut stuff with it? Well... no. Engineers as they are, they HAVE done a bunch of pressure tests on them to test their durability (they are weakest, not surprisingly, at the graft points). They plan to cut stuff with one later on, so your nanocheese will have to wait. Nonetheless, this and other nanotools this team has developed might greatly help biologists do... whatever the hell it is they do. Something about life and shit.

(And check out that hot AFM action in the pic! Makes ME wanna la-la. In the kitchen, on the... lab... floor.)