A smartphone can tell you where to get a cup of coffee, but it can't go get the coffee for you. Engineers would like to build little machines that can do stuff. They would be useful for a lot more than coffee, if we could figure out how to make them work.
But the rules of mechanics change at small scales. Friction becomes dominant; turbulence can upend a small airplane. (Read more!)
An insect's eye lets it see really well
because each of its light-sensitive cells has a dedicated lens. This
miniature camera, which mimics an insect eye, is made from an array of
microlenses arranged on a stretchable sheet that can be inflated like a
balloon to a hemispherical shape.
University of Illinois and Beckman Institute
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