This is the world's smallest and happiest snowman
A winter wonderland that's smaller than a human hair.
The holiday season gets bigger and more hectic every year -- and maybe you're looking for a smaller, more adorable way to celebrate. Here's one: the world's smallest snowman. This microscopic frosty was built by the nanofabrication lab at London's Western University. He's adorable, but you'll need an electron microscope to see him in person: according to the lab's Tumblr page, the snowman stands at just three microns tall, or about 0.003mm. For comparison, a human hair is about 75 microns thick (0.075mm).
Despite the nomenclature, snow wasn't the lab's medium of choice. This winter decoration was constructed from three 0.9 micron silica spheres, stacked via electon beam lithography. A focused ion beam cut the jolly soul's eyes and mouth, and the figure's nose and arms were sculpted from platinum. It's a small, but impressive artistic feat -- and it beats out the last 'world's smallest snowman' (0.01mm) by a wide margin. Or a small one. We're not sure.
