Credit Courtesy of Wim Noorduin/Harvard University
Nanoflowers, each smaller than the thickness of a dollar bill, sprout up spontaneously on a surface dipped in salts and silicon.
Credit Courtesy of Wim Noorduin/Harvard University
A field of nanoviolets sprouts up on a glass plate dipped into a solution of minerals and silicon.
Credit Courtesy of Wim Noorduin/Harvard University
The flowers grow in a stepwise process. First, Noorduin seeds crystals at the glass plate's surface to create the pink vase. The green stems nucleate inside the vases. And then a burst of carbon dioxides triggers the violets to blossom.
Credit Courtesy of Wim Noorduin/Harvard University
All of the flowers are crystals of silicon and minerals. Wim Noorduin sculpts the stems and blossoms by tweaking the environment in which the crystals grow.
Credit Courtesy of Wim Noorduin/Harvard University
The images are falsely colored (because the electron microscope only photographs in black and white). But in this image, the colors represent the ones you'd actually see if the human eye could detect such small objects.
Credit Courtesy of Wim Noorduin/Harvard University
Noorduin creates ripples in the petals by sending pulses of carbon dioxide through the solution.
Credit Courtesy of Wim Noorduin/Harvard University
This flower would fit perfectly on Abraham Lincoln's jacket lapel on the backside of a penny.
Credit Courtesy of Wim Noorduin/Harvard University
Each rose sculpture is about half the thickness of a dollar bill. The only way to see the sculptures is with a microscope.
Credit Courtesy of Wim Noorduin/Harvard University
This microcorsage is sized perfectly for Abraham Lincoln's jacket lapel on the back of a penny.
Credit Courtesy of Wim Noorduin
Sense Of Scale: Nanoflower scupltures grow in front of the Lincoln Memorial imprinted on the back of a penny.
April showers bring May flowers. But in this case, the blossoms are too small for even a bumblebee to see.
Engineers at Harvard University have figured out a way to make microscopic sculptures of roses, tulips and violets, each smaller than a strand of hair.
To get a sense of just how small these flower sculptures are, grab a penny and flip it on its back. Right in the middle of the Lincoln Memorial, you'll see a faint impression of Abraham Lincoln. These roses would make a perfect corsage for the president's jacket lapel.
A search for places to stay in New York City via Airbnb returns plenty of results, despite the practice of short-term rentals being found to be illegal under city and state law.
People who use Airbnb, the web company that pairs travelers with residents who rent out their homes on a short-term basis, are breaking New York City's laws, according to an administrative law judge. The vacation rental business was found to run afoul of the city's occupancy code; it also doesn't conform with a state law.
Sensitive personal information for thousands of applicants to a government phone program was exposed to the public on the internet, according to a new investigative report from Scripps Howard News Service.
The federal program is called Lifeline, and it reimburses phone companies for providing service to low-income Americans.
When news of Yahoo's purchase of Tumblr first hit, Tumblr users took their reactions online. The posts were quirky and sharp with plenty of worry about the future.
John Warner surveys the damage near a friend's mobile home in the Steelman Estates Mobile Home Park, destroyed in Sunday's tornado, near Shawnee, Okla., on Monday.
From NPR News, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
I'm Robert Siegel. Some big numbers are being thrown around in Silicon Valley today. This morning, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced that Yahoo is buying Tumblr, a social media and blogging startup. The price, $1.1 billion and that for a site which last year earned a tiny fraction of that amount in revenue.
An Xbox 360 video presentation at the E3 Media and Business Summit in Los Angeles in 2008. Microsoft is scheduled to introduce its newest Xbox on Tuesday.
Microsoft hasn't exactly had a great couple of years.
Its new Windows 8 operating system was held responsible for the drop in PC sales last quarter. Sales of its Windows Phones lag far behind both the iPhone and Google's Android phones.
The light in the darkness for Microsoft has been the Xbox 360, which has been the top-selling game console for over two years — beating out both the Nintendo Wii and Sony's PlayStation. On Tuesday, Microsoft is expected to announce a new version of the Xbox.
Yahoo's $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr could be considered a bargain compared with its other big-dollar bets. The company's history is dotted with pricey purchases of once-hot Web properties that had more promise than eventual purpose. A look back:
