How Small Is Small?

well this little house,

is about as small as a house can be, with a gabled roof, windows, a chimney and, of course, a front door, standing just over one two-thousandth of an inch (.0006 inches), the world’s tiniest home sits on an optical fiber cable, about the thickness of a human hair, was designed and built by French researchers from the Femto-ST Institute, 

 a tiny robot ‘constructed’ the structure in a vacuum chamber, then used an ion beam to slice out the details from an ultra-slim sheet of silica,

 nano-bots built this small shelter at a scale that it could house a microscopic organism but not much else — it was modeled to demonstrate their abilities to achieve high precision at incredibly minute scales. “We decided to build the micro-house on the fibre to show that we are able to realise these microsystem assemblies on top of an optical fibre with high accuracy,” said one of the engineers,

and while it sounds like a fun side project to show off new capabilities, the implications are far-reaching. “With this advancement, optical fibres as thin as human hair can be inserted into inaccessible locations like jet engines and blood vessels to detect radiation levels or viral molecules,” says the American Institute of Physics, amazing, a house on a hair.