Lastly, the week saw the unveiling of the world's first fiber-optic solar cell, which is thinner than the width of a human hair and could pave the way to creating energy-producing clothes.
The fabric Jonathan Engel and Chang Liu have produced has a similar strength to nylon and can conduct electricity thanks to the way it is formed by interlocking rings and rectangles of about 500 microns in width.
All of a sudden, it seemed that there was a conceptually easy way to make a single website look good on multiple screen sizes just worry about the pixel width of the viewport.
"A researcher I was speaking to recently reckons green walls in urban canyon environments (areas where walls are higher than the width of the road separating them) are more effective than trees at collecting particles because the way the wind eddies around and then moves down the wall, " Laurence said.
Nektar therapeutic's engineering feat--the first insulin inhaler for adult diabetics--required inventing a way to turn liquid insulin into a powder of uniform particles just 2 microns wide (one one-thousandth the width of a pinhead), each containing hundreds of millions of stable insulin molecules.