if everything we own had improved over the last 25 years as much as electronics have, the average family car would travel four times faster than the space shuttle. houses would cost two hundred bucks. what's the secret behind electronics' stunning advances? how many times have i reviewed these and wondered exactly what's inside there? do you mind if i have a look? no, not at all, go ahead. i'd like to have a look inside. please do. where i come from, you want to know how something works, you cut it open. sony versus saw. here we go. think you guys are standing far enough back? 'cause i would not want anyone to get hurt. (evil laughter) what do you think we'll find? elves? butterflies? and now let's see what really is on the inside of a digital camera. not much, really. and no moving parts at all. this digital camera... this is the brains. pogue: ...runs on a half-inch-wide microchip. so it seems like if this is really the heart of the camera, a lot of it just exists so that i can handle it with my big human hands. correct, 'cause that's not exactly the most comfortable form factor you want to be using right there. i know. honey, smile. c'mon, let me see you smile... c'mon. pogue: this tiny wafer contains a highly sophisticated machine. what's it made of? a computer chip is like a densely packed city-- a solid slab of silicon sprinkled with other elements like boron and arsenic, topped by layers of metals and ceramics. they're laid out like tiny, functional neighborhoods. over here is memory. 50 years ago you'd have needed a whole building full of vacuum tubes to store just a fraction of what fits in here. over here is where data comes in and out of the chip. 50 years ago the fastest computer on earth could process maybe a few hundred punch cards a minute. today, data goes in and out billions of times faster. and here is the processor. 50 years ago a computer could add a few thousand numbers in a second. in that same amount of time, this tiny chip can perform billions of calculations. scientists have discovered that the secret to cheap computing power is size. when we find the right materials and make them small, they change the world. the race to miniaturize began 500 years ago with an invention that, in its day, was the first personal computer. i'm talking about the watch. how did they go from big wall-mounted grandfather clocks to something you could wear on your wrist? the miniaturization. more functions in a smaller space... pogue: pierre gygax is a watchmaker in switzerland. some of his watches have more than 400 components. and how small are some of the parts? there are parts which are .006 millimeter. so that means a half the thickness of a hair. wow. hundreds of precision metal pieces, all driven by a simple mechanism that all clocks have in one form or another: the oscillator, the beating heart of the machine. it's the piece that puts the tick and the tock in time. gygax: you know the time is flowing. and it's always difficult to measure something flowing. so, what we do is we cut the time in slices. and the oscillator is counting the slices. pogue: the original oscillator was the pendulum, slicing like a knife through time, with each swing counted by the movement of circular gears. but pendulum clocks work only if they're upright in a fixed position. so in the middle ages, clocks were confined to immovable structures like towers or furniture. but in the 15th century, the invention of the mainspring changed everything. it was essentially the first battery-- a metal coil that could store mechanical energy. as it unwound, the mainspring powered a compact wheel. it was a major breakthrough. suddenly, gravity and the pendulum were no longer necessary. the new spring-driven mechanism made it possible to shrink the clock to fit into a hand or a pocket. and the pocket watch was born. gygax: this watch is absolutely amazing. it shows the exact position of the sun and the moon all around the earth from the top of the north pole. pogue: oh man, that's really cool. and how much does this watch go for? between $80,000 and $90,000. (laughs) pogue: but no need to spend 90 grand to find out what time it is. nowadays, super accurate watches are disposable... thanks to another great clock revolution, which began in the 1960s. out went the spring and mechanical oscillator, replaced by a tiny sliver of solid mineral quartz. slice a piece of quartz small enough, send an electric current through it and it vibrates-- fast. a quartz-driven clock can accurately chop time into millionths of a second. but the biggest selling point for quartz is that it's cheap. that's because quartz is actually silicon-- commonplace sand, the second most abundant element on earth. for the first time, a material replaced a machine, opening a door to a new era of miniaturization. but silicon can do more than just mark time. it's a member of a strange class of elements called semiconductors found on the table of the elements. as the name implies, they occupy a middle zone between metals, which conduct electric current, and insulators, like rubber and plastic, which don't. think of water flowing through a pipe. an insulator is like a pipe that's frozen-- electrons can't get through. semiconductors are materials that change from free-flowing conductor to a frozen insulator and back again simply by zapping them with an electric current. switches made out of semiconductors are called transistors, and their amazing "on again, off again" switching ability made the computer revolution possible. but how did they get to be so small? one great place to look for answers is intel, a pioneer in squeezing tiny transistors onto computer chips. i've met a lot of scientists who talk about switches and semiconductors, and somehow they're fulfilling the same function. but what is it? stephen smith: what we're trying to build with a semiconductor is a switch. this is one from the wall, something you'd use to turn on a light and turn off. and, in fact, when we push the switch up, we give an input, the light is the output. pogue: so, in science fair terms, a switch, then, lets electricity go through or stops it. exactly, based on the input, we change the flow of electricity. electricity on or off. it's the only language computers understand. when the switch is off, the computer reads a zero. when the switch is on, the computer reads a one. string a bunch of switches together and you can create a code. with just eight switches, you can represent any symbol on a keyboard. for a page, you need about 25,000 switches. 1.4 million will get you a second of music. photos need tens of millions. and videos? we're talking about tens of billions. the more switches, the more power. the story of the computer revolution is the story of the shrinking switch. early computers used mechanical relays and vacuum tubes as switches. building a machine with just a few thousand took up rooms of space. but the silicon transistor changed all that. because it's a material, not a machine, it's easy to shrink. smith: well, the exciting part about silicon transistors is we're actually using the atomic properties of the silicon. so rather than actually having to craft something, to build a switch, to build the pieces, to build a spring, i, actually, by doing some smart engineering, can get the electrons to flow by using the properties of the atom. and we brought some material to illustrate that. what we have here... you just happen to have a hunk of cheese lying around the lab? a hunk of cheese. so think of this as the silicon material. i can actually take a slice of that silicon and i can use the atomic properties of this slice to build those transistors. ladies and gentlemen, the pentium cheesium five. um, i understand it works really well with the computer mouse. you can use that. all right, so you're saying that one beauty of silicon is that you can cut it in half, and it's still silicon. and you can slice it again, smaller and smaller and smaller, but it still does just as good a job of passing along the ones and zeros. absolutely. and i can use those material properties until i get down to the size of only a few atoms of silicon. wow. which is not something you could do to make mechanical switches smaller, right? like, if i wanted to make this smaller, you know, i can't just go like this... wow! ...and you can have a smaller one. clearly, this is not going to be a smaller, good switch. right. (laughing) but this is silicon. it is a purified element that one mines. all right, so what does it look like in the computer, then? well, by the time it gets to the computer, it actually is one of these devices. so this shiny surface is a piece of refined silicon. it has transistors built into it. we've actually flipped it over so the transistors are on the other side and what you see is the back of that piece of silicon. and this is how many of those little on/off switches? this is almost a billion transistors. wow. pogue: a billion switches on a one-inch chip. what's even more astonishing is that one of the founders of intel saw this coming. in the '60s, gordon moore predicted that the size of transistors would shrink by half every two years, each time doubling the number that could be squeezed onto a single chip. this idea is known as moore's law. and it has proved to be incredibly accurate. but now, 50 years later, moore's law may be finally running out of steam. the transistors that power our stuff are about as small as they can get unless scientists can come up with a new way of packing them ever more tightly together. to see one of those possible solutions, i've crossed the country to visit the ibm research and development... kitchen? so this is moore's law of italian cooking. that's right. what we're going to do is explain why it's so important to get the transistors smaller and smaller. pogue: frances has a pretty appetizing way of visualizing this law and its limitations. like pepperoni slices, the transistors on a silicon chip are flat. okay, so here's our... silicon wafer. silicon wafer. now these are the old-fashioned transistors. they're much larger and you can see that you can't put that many onto each wafer. so this would be a 1960 ipod? i think so, yes. this would be a '60s type of thing. so let's take off these old transistors and replace them with some new transistors. oh, these are much smaller. yes, these new transistors are much smaller. technology has marched on. that's right, it's moore's law in action. so, in other words, all we have to do is make the transistors smaller every year forever and our gadgets will always be more powerful and more compact. that would be wonderful, but we can't make our pepperoni slices much smaller than this. and these transistors are now packed together about as close as we can get them. pogue: the pizza party can't go on forever. there's a limit to how small you can shrink the transistors. if you reduce the surface area of a transistor too much and place it too close to its neighbor, electricity starts to leak, causing a short circuit. not good. we've run out of area, so there's only one way to go, and that's upwards. slim jims? that's right. this is a vertical transistor. instead of having flatter, smaller transistors, we go in the other direction. excuse me, vertical transistors? vertical transistors. with little toothpicks on the bottom? that's just for demonstration purposes. pogue: by building vertical transistors, called nano wires, frances can increase surface area without bringing the transistors closer to together, so no short circuit. ingenious. so this is what you're doing at ibm, you're making these? that's right. they're called nano wires. and the real thing is about a million times smaller than this. a million times smaller? that's right. well, that'd be hard to see. pogue: they're hard to see, but this is not a nano wire. this is a silicon sliver frances uses as a surface to grow them. ross: we get tens of millions of wires on each of these specimens. come on! now you're hurting my brain. pogue: she carefully loads the wafer into a molybdenum clip and slides it into a custom-built oven where she'll bake it at 1,100 degrees fahrenheit. you know what i was just thinking, frances? i don't think you have enough aluminum foil on this oven. ross: yes, it's the question everyone asks. it holds the heat better. aluminum foil? that's what we use. isn't that a little low tech? that's right, whatever works. pogue: oh, my gosh. so those little spires... ross: those are the nano wires. so you bake those up? we just grew these, yes. pogue: we can see them because this oven doubles as an electron microscope. all right, so these are them, huh? ross: this is 30,000 times magnified. pogue: 30,000 times?! that's right. so here's the column of silicon that's the nano wire and here's the gold droplet on the end that actually makes it grow. it's weird, it looks like matchsticks or weird mushrooms. they do, mushrooms. that's right, they look to me like mushrooms. pogue: that's amazing. ross: so we're trying different catalysts, different recipes, but this here is the future of transistors. pogue: wow. while scientists like frances try to find ways to push silicon to its limit, others are pinning their hopes on a new material that lets electrons flow a thousand times faster than they can in silicon. it's ultra thin and super strong, and it's called graphene. pablo jarillo-herrero: when graphene happened, i just couldn't stop myself from going into it. it was so beautiful, i just couldn't stop. i immediately jumped onto it. pogue: this is dr. pablo jarillo-herrero, a professor at mit and graphene guru. jarillo-herrero: here i have graphene. graphene is the thinnest material that exists. this is just one atom thick sheet of graphene. and you can see that it's perfectly visible. so, it's part of the magic of graphene that you can just see it, even with your eyes. pogue: you heard that right-- this gray square of graphene is just a single atom thick. although graphene was first discovered only recently, it's been hiding in plain sight for ages in a material you probably have on your desk: graphite, also known as pencil lead. jarillo-herrero: you can write with a pencil because graphite is a layered material. and as you write, you are leaving traces of these layers on your piece of paper. so graphene is really just one sheet of this graphite material, a one atom-thick sheet. pogue: that makes graphene an ideal conductor. at only one atom thick, there's nothing to restrict free electrons, which flow across the surface of the material like water across flat ice. jarillo-herrero: graphene is a very special conductor, is the best conductor, and we're now studying those properties and learning how fantastic this material is. pogue: and scientists have also figured out how to make transistors out of graphene, giving it the ability to speak the language that electronics and computers understand. jarillo-herrero: so, i'm excited. it's beautiful. here you have a material that will enable ultra high-speed electronics working at very low power. pogue: but it gets even better. turns out the only tool you need to make graphene is a piece of tape. jarillo-herrero: it is so simple any high school student can indeed make one atom-thick devices with this. it's really amazing. that scotch tape is going to be folded into two, and then when we separate the tape, this graphite naturally exfoliates into two pieces. then we're going to fold it again to split into four pieces. then eight, do it again. and again, making the piece of graphite thinner and thinner and thinner, basically until we cover the entire tape with graphite. we're then going to take a silicon chip, deposit it on top of the tape. and what we're hoping is that the graphite pieces, which are on the tape, are going to get in intimate contact with the silicon. so when you remove the chip and you look then with optical microscope, you can see the one atom-thick material. and that's graphene. pogue: graphene promises to make the impossible possible-- letting electrons move across its surface at virtually the speed of light and generating almost no heat. in fact, graphene is such a revolutionary material that in 2010, a mere six years after its discovery, the two russian scientists who first made it received the nobel prize in physics. the computer chips of tomorrow could be a quantum leap forward: computers with nearly limitless processing power; every book ever written stored on a tiny chip; a highway system so smart it could control millions of cars without a single accident. and it's not just about our gadgets, it's about us. while the electronics story continues to unfold in amazing ways, the story is beginning all over again with a materials revolution in medicine. it's not a new idea. remember this? man: phase one calls for miniaturizing a submarine and injecting it into the carotid artery. pogue: fantastic voyage. it was the sci-fi smash of 1966. man: phase one. phase one. pogue: scientists shrink a team of doctors and send them into a sick man's body on a mission to cure him. man: all stations stand by. inject. pogue: today, as our devices get smaller and smaller, fantastic voyage is beginning to look like prophecy, the kind of thing that can change lives. hi, courtney, how are you? hi, dr. mishkin, how are you? good, yourself? pogue: today courtney will be taking a pill, but it's not just any pill. it's a miniaturized camera. this capsule is a miniaturized camera. every time it blinks it's actually taking a picture. it's acquiring images at a rate of two frames per second. okay. and what i'm going to get you to do is actually to swallow the capsule. and as the capsule goes through the gi tract, it's going to be taking pictures of what's going on inside. pogue: it's called the pillcam and it travels through the body just like a piece of food, taking 55,000 pictures over the course of eight hours. why don't we actually put it inside your hand... pogue: pictures that can provide a diagnosis that once would have required surgery. as you move it around, we can actually see the folds of your hands with excellent magnification. so once we actually go ahead and ingest the capsule, it's going to give us that same magnification of what's going on inside. wow, that's really cool. it actually has a wireless transmitter that's going to transmit the images to a data recorder that you're wearing over the course of the day. and i'm going to download the images and be able to look at them and analyze exactly what's going on. pogue: the pillcam is made of an inert plastic that doesn't create a toxic response in the body. inside is a mini-catalog of the electronics industry-- a tiny video camera and flash, a radio transmitter, a battery, and, of course, a computer chip to drive it all. 25 years ago, all of those components would have taken up a cubic yard of space. today it all fits inside a one-inch capsule that weighs only a fraction of an ounce. so let's go ahead and ingest it. okay. ready, into your mouth. i'll give you a glass of water. so now i see your teeth. and go ahead, down the hatch. okay, great. so that's it, that's the hardest part. okay. just remember, over the next two hours do not drink anything. okay. pogue: as the pillcam moves through courtney's digestive tract, it records what it sees, eventually giving dr. mishkin a front-row seat as he looks for abnormalities. mishkin: right now we're looking at the small intestine. it's able to see 360 degrees such that it's like looking down a gun barrel. the capsule is great at acquiring images, but i'm hoping that as the next generations of this capsule develop that it's not only going to be able to take pictures, but it will be able to potentially biopsy, sample the tissue in that area. or even deliver a treatment, such as placing a clip on a bleeding site, or even deliver medications. pogue: the pillcam is the pocket watch of today-- a super-miniaturized machine that liberates the patient. it took centuries to make the leap from mechanical watches to computers. but in the world of microscopic medicine, the story of smaller is unfolding on a vastly accelerated time frame. in fact, scientists are on the verge of realizing a 21st century version of the fantastic voyage story. they're developing microscopically small robots that travel into the body's deepest reaches to diagnose, treat, and even destroy deadly illnesses. pogue: this is your lab? bradley nelson: this is my lab. this is where you build your robots? this is where we build the robots. pogue: this is brad nelson. he's created a robot that could help cure blindness. it's incredibly life-like. nelson: that's a mannequin. pogue: oh, sorry. these are the ones we build. what?! that's a robot? that's a robot. looks like a splinter. well, this is a micro robot. we use them to help perform surgeries on the eye or inside of the eye. pogue: the device is only a hundredth of an inch wide, small enough to fit into the needle of a syringe, like the tiny sub in fantastic voyage. but the similarity ends there. this unmanned device is designed to treat a type of blindness caused by blocked blood vessels in the retina, the tissue where images are formed. the robot delivers an extremely small dose of medicine to restore blood flow and vision. that makes me think that this little tiny thing has batteries and little propellers and some kind of knowledge to know where to go in the eye. i have a hard time believing that. that's right, so the way we energize this is we use externally generated electromagnetic fields. so basically, it's a magnet, and... pogue: to make the device small enough, brad had to abandon the idea that robots have to be mechanical. instead he focused on finding a material that would let him eliminate bulky moving parts. he chose two elements: samarium and cobalt. combined, they form a material highly sensitive to magnetic fields, which means that brad can direct the movement of the robot without touching it. once again, a material replaces a machine and the device gets smaller. so then besides just the robot, what we also have is this system here of electromagnets, and so what each of these copper coils do is they generate magnetic fields. oh, man. yeah, you got a bunch of them in every direction. and so we have eight of these here. that's why we call this the octomag. octomag? that's right. pogue: the octomag. by adjusting the strength of these eight electromagnets, the surgeon can move the micro robot any direction along the x, y or z axis, pushing or pulling it through the eye. but landing it on the tiny section of retina that's used for seeing in sharp detail takes lots of practice. and you've been practicing with dummy eyeballs so far? nelson: we use that, but we also use animal eyes as well. we get pigs' eyes from our local butcher, so... you buy eyeballs from the butcher, from cadavers? that's right-- christos, one of my ph.d. students here, christos goes in the morning, early in the morning to the butcher and asks for eyeballs. pogue: christos, how are you? fine. (laughing): oh, my god... these are the pig eyes. exactly. twenty pig eyes fresh from the butcher. ready to be prepared for experiments. you must be a big hit around halloween. and what about this guy, what's this all about? ah, we call him mr. pig eye guy. mr. pig eye guy? well, you have to give them a name. then we put the eyes in this hole here. (pogue laughing) pogue: once the eyeball is secured inside the socket, we insert a light probe. christos: that's the light there. oh, i can actually see the light in it-- very cool. pogue: this tiny led lets us see what we're doing when we drive the robot. so, this is the robot right here? mm-hmm. okay, and this isn't fake. we're really seeing this live from the microscope right now, right? yes. you can move this guy around. okay, sure enough. i push right, he goes right. left he goes left. let's see when i go down over here... and then you can pull up... oh, it's getting bigger. exactly, this means that it's moving higher, away from the retina. oh, man! i think i just banged the top of the... exactly, so.... cornea or whatever you... that's the very top, and this is where the liquid ends, so you see this effect. now let me push down. when you push down it starts slowly going into the retina. i'm sinking... sinking! wow, that's really cool. so now you've reached the bottom. you're touching the retina. yeah, it's quite responsive. can go right up here... pogue: eventually brad hopes that there will be a commercial version of his device installed in doctors' offices. the magnets will be arranged in a housing that surrounds the patient's head while the doctor peers through a microscope to guide the drug-filled robot. brad's initial success combining materials and magnetic fields to make tiny devices has encouraged him to be even more ambitious. his goal is to build a robot that can swim through blood vessels. but along the way he's discovered that the smaller you go, the stranger the world becomes. oh, dear, looks like the grad students have left their things out again. pogue: and the harder it is to get around. nelson: so what we've seen so far are the micro robots for the eye. we're interested in going even smaller and trying to make smaller robots. so i set up an experiment here to kind of show you what some of the problems are when we try to make small things swim and why it's so much different than how big things like fish or toys like this swim in water. okay. so what we've got here are two tanks. one is just regular water, out of the tap. this other one is glycerin. it's much thicker, kind of like oil or corn syrup, something thick like that. so let's look at how something like this toy goldfish is going to swim in water. wind her up? wind her up and let her go. (toy clicking) okay, the tail goes back and forth. just the way you'd expect. i'd say that swimming is fairly effective. okay, he's got a twin over there. let's see how he does in glycerin. and this one is going to go in the goop. (toy buzzing) and he wags his tail and he (laughs)... doesn't move at all. this helps us illustrate how water feels when you get small. so if you took yourself and you made yourself about 10,000 times smaller and you jumped in this pool of water, you would actually feel more like you were swimming in glycerin here, or goopy stuff like honey or something thick like that. pogue: a swimmer the size of a bacterium would never be able to get around using flippers or the breast stroke, because at that size, the friction from the water molecules becomes a major drag. for a long time, scientists couldn't figure out how bacteria were able to swim. but eventually they discovered the secret. the tail-- or flagellum-- seems to move back and forth. but viewed from another angle, it's clear that it moves in a totally different way. a corkscrew tail. a corkscrew tail. pogue: brad and his team have developed corkscrew robots that mimic bacteria. bacteria like e. coli and salmonella have developed these flagella that twist. this part is the flagella? this flagella twists through the liquid just like a corkscrew going into a bottle of wine. so instead of propelling itself or using its inertia, it's actually kind of cutting through the fluid. it's almost pulling itself instead of pushing itself. it's pulling itself in a sense, like a screw going into wood or something like that. it's a completely different material interaction. very cool. pogue: they use the same samarium-cobalt material and magnetic fields to set them in motion. pogue: so it's literally, like, drilling its way through that liquid. it's drilling its way up. wow! pogue: this is the biggest one. the smallest one is only 30 microns long. that's 30 millionths of a meter, about a third the width of a human hair. nelson: so, now just in the last few years, we've actually been able to build small things of a similar size and shape to real bacteria that swim just like they do, potentially deep inside a person's body. pogue: the magnet-driven robots in brad's lab-- the eye bot, the flagella bot and even a soccer-playing robot that his students created-- are each no bigger than a dust speck. brad's learned to modify his robots to overcome the physical obstacles in the microscopic realm. but he's only scratched the surface of the strange properties in that infinitessimal world. an atom is actually a fraction of a nanometer. pogue: chad mirkin is an explorer and pioneer in this weird realm-- the nano world. you keep saying you're building things on the nanometer scale. i don't even know what a nanometer is. so this is a meter, this is a centimeter, this is a millimeter. is this a nanometer? what's a nanometer? let me try to illustrate it for you. if we shrink you by a factor of two, you're about the size of a small child. we continue to shrink you by a factor of two four more times, you're about the size of a golf ball. we go to ten, you're now the size of an ant. we keep going another seven times, and now you're about the diameter of a human hair. that's roughly what we can see with the naked eye. pogue: even after so much shrinking, i'm not even close to the nano scale. cut me in half five more times, and i'm the size of a red blood cell. five more times, i'm a virus. seven more times and i'm finally one nanometer in size-- one billionth of a meter. that's less than half the width of dna. it seems unimaginable that we might harness materials this small. but in fact, it's not all that new. people have been using nanotechnology almost unknowingly for centuries. for example, back in the middle ages, when stained glass windows were made, they were using tiny little particles to get the beautiful colors. you simply need to go to canterbury cathedral and you can see the effects of nanotechnology in the beautiful glass windows. pogue: canterbury cathedral. some of the stained glass in here is nearly a thousand years old. with so much history under one roof, it's no surprise that the cathedral needs a full-time staff of glass preservationists. so this is the paint station. this is like my local home depot with different swatches, right? it's a little bit like that, yes. pogue: this is leonie seliger, the head restorer at the cathedral. i've come in search of ancient nanotech secrets. um, what we're looking at here are stains. the stain gets fired, so it's like pottery glaze. it's fused onto the surface of the glass. okay. the trouble is that you don't just paint a yellow color on glass and you know how deep and how rich it is. you have to use a chemical process. so, to make yellow, you mix silver with clay. silver and the heat actually produces a yellow glass. wow! pogue: she's using silver chloride, which in its natural form looks like small, silvery crystals. leonie mixes a tiny amount with red clay. seliger: it's a silver salt that is mixed with this clay. i got you. you can't see it; what you see is the clay. okay, okay. you would then paint that on. i've made a little series here where i've now applied this clay, and after it's fired if i then wipe that off... presto. oh, look at that! from silver clay comes a golden color. there's some kind of voodoo chemistry going on there for sure. that's the mystery. pogue: somehow this is nanotechnology at work. in the heating process, the silver crystals break down into tiny nanoparticles and turn yellow. but it only works on this glass. pogue: and that's not all. leonie assures me that there are several other metals used in stained glass where nanotech creates surprising color results. copper would give you... brown. or red. red? or green. that's just bizarre. gold gives you beautiful rich pink glass, even rich ruby glass. and why is that? why is something that we think of as gold, why does it come out red? ask a chemist. (both laughing) it's magic. it is a bit. i mean, in the middle ages, of course, it was always a closely guarded secret, what makes what color, at which temperature. pogue: when artists first learned how to change the colors of metals, it must have seemed like alchemy. but in fact, it had something to do with changes at the smallest possible scale. i want to get to the bottom of that mystery. so this is your inventory here? this is our stock. pogue: so i'm digging a little deeper at the english antique glass company, which makes the colored glass used to repair canterbury's windows. these come all blues. wow. pogue: these sheets are crafted by hand, still using the same techniques that were developed in the 12th century. pogue: how many establishments are there? making this? one. we're the only makers of flat glass, traditional methods, in the uk and ireland. pogue: this is mike tuffey, the head of production here. he and his team of glassblowers are able to achieve the same rich colors found in the cathedral. but they start with clear glass, which is made from a mix of sand, limestone, sodium carbonate and other minerals. oh, my gosh, that's it? that's it. that's the next great cathedral window right there? that's the next great cathedral window right there. it looks like kitty litter. it doesn't even look like glass. we just put that in the furnace. this is a rod we use for the different colors. pogue: the rods contain concentrated amounts of the metals that create color when added to the clear glass. the color appears when it's fired at 1,200 degrees fahrenheit. so, what does it look like when it comes out? is it a sheet? is it a blob? it's a blob. pogue: the journey from molten blob to colored glass is an intricate process of shaping, blowing and refiring, resulting in a glass cylinder called a muff. it's this heating and cooling process that creates the final color, thanks to the action of the metal nanoparticles. you slit it and then you have a flattening machine that uncurls it? that's it. that's a gold, pink muff. there's gold dust in there? yes. but it doesn't look gold, it looks pinkish. no, gold gives you pink. gold gives you pink? gold gives you pink. why would that be? um, you would need to talk to a chemist on that one. (laughing): i plan to do that. pogue: same answer. i'm 0 for two with the stained glass people. so i went to canterbury cathedral, and i actually spoke to the guy who makes the glass and the lady who does the repairs on those windows and they said, sure enough, they add gold to the glass to make it red. it doesn't make any sense. and you know what they told me? "we have no clue." but you're the scientist man. you should... you should be able to explain why gold makes red. well, it turns out if you can control the size of a gold particle, if you can shrink it to this nanometer-length scale, you have completely different optical properties. gold is no longer gold. when taken to the 13-nanometer size, it's ruby red in color. pogue: when light rays hit a colored material, some colors are absorbed and some are reflected. that's why roses are red and violets are blue. many metals, like gold and silver, reflect most of the colors in visible light, which is why they can be polished to shine like mirrors. but when a particle of gold is made very small-- below 100 nanometers, 100 billionths of a meter-- the particle begins to absorb shorter wavelengths of light, toward the blue end of the spectrum. the smaller the particle, the more blue is absorbed and the redder it appears. but it gets even stranger. because not only size matters, shape does too. each of these vials contains water with silver nanoparticles dissolved in it. the only difference between them is the shape of the particles. in this test, silver rods give you yellow, silver triangles green, silver prisms give you blue. if metals behaved like this in our big world, then just changing the size or shape of your car would alter its color. chad sees tremendous potential in this weird nano phenomenon. with almost an infinite number of possibilities, you no longer have to take what nature gives you. you can adjust color simply by becoming a nano architect. pogue: scientists call this strange property of small materials "structural color." the living world figured this out millions of years ago. structural color on the nano scale creates the iridescent pigments in butterfly wings, beetle shells and peacock feathers. well, why do we care? i mean, cool, little tiny gold particles are really red. i mean, how does that help mankind? well, the reason we care is that once you discover new properties, those new properties almost always lead to new applications. there are already a number of medical applications. chad mirkin has developed a technology that harnesses the unique properties of gold and silver nanoparticles to test for genetic variations in patients. sequencing dna is expensive and time consuming. but chad's revolutionary test takes less than two hours. i offered to bleed for science to see how it works. and your name is? david. okay, so we're doing a little blood draw today. you can relax. is this the, uh, extraction bench? yes, this is. pogue: first, a technician extracts pure dna from my blood sample. this is my dna? this is your dna. pogue: he then loads it into a small, disposable cartridge and inserts it into the machine for testing. this test can actually read the letters of my dna. and using gold nanoparticles, it flags variations that might make me unusually sensitive to particular drugs, or even mutations that signal heightened risk for disease. less than two hours after drawing my blood, the results are in. it turns out that the test has some interesting news for me about my sensitivity to a blood thinning drug called warfarin, or coumadin. it's commonly prescribed to stroke and cardiac patients. it's a potentially lifesaving drug, but if the dosage is wrong, it can cause fatal bleeding. so what's my warfarin dosage? what they call a double hit, i'm sorry to say. (laughing): a double hit? you're a double hit. so you have two genes that are mutated, and therefore you're very sensitive to warfarin and your calculated dose is 2.7 milligrams. see, i knew it! my mother always said it would be like 2.6 or 2.5, but i always said, "no, mom, mine's 2.7." you should always listen to your mom, though, david. pogue: the nanosphere test gave me some crucial information. technician: this is the mutation. pogue: quickly enough to save my life, if i'd been ill. it's a diagnostic tool. the next goal is to fight illness in the body at the same tiny scale. samuel wickline: okay, so when we inject this, it will go in the blood stream and find the cancer, like a rocket guidance system. pogue: sam wickline has invented a nano device that's smaller than a virus. engineered atom by atom, his hunter-killer robots are designed to travel by the billions in the bloodstream. they're pre-programmed by a doctor to seek out specific types of cancer cells and then destroy them-- with none of the side effects associated with current drug therapies. it's the ultimate fantastic voyage dream. and it's borrowing a page from these little guys. pogue: wow! see here now. whoa! this is full of honey. see, there's probably 35 pounds of honey in there. oh, my gosh. in fact, i'll take it out and show you. pogue: he's brought me to meet beekeeper ted jansen to get a close-up look at the inspiration behind the science. jansen: now, see, here's one that's already stung me, see? what, what? but aren't you gonna say "ow" or something? no, that... see... oh, my gosh. see, that's the little venom sac that they leave. it's not the stinger that hurts you, it's the venom going in you. pogue: a bee sting may seem like a minor irritation, but actually the venom is extremely toxic to cells. jansen: immediately when you get it out of there, the pain stops. so why would it have been bad for you to just pluck it out? because you squeeze the sack and squeeze all the venom... oh, i see, i see. so, sam, you're not here to see how they make honey. wickline: no, we like the bees because they make a toxin. the toxin is melittin. and we use it to specifically treat cancers. bee venom is a cancer drug? yes, bee venom is an excellent cancer drug. it's been known for quite some time, but the problem is how to deliver it. pogue: melittin is not being used yet to fight cancer, because it will destroy any cell it bumps into, including healthy ones. but realizing its potential, sam set out to engineer a nano-scale robot to carry the toxin safely through the body and release it only when it finds its target. not surprisingly, he calls his invention nanobees. each nanobee has three parts. so, what we've got here is a model. pogue: sam explains with a simple demonstration of how they fit together. this basically is a sphere of carbon and fluorine atoms that forms the carrier for that melittin. pogue: the center of the nanobee is a nanoparticle constructed out of several thousand carbon and fluorine atoms arranged in a spherical cluster less than 300 nanometers in diameter. and then we have a coating on that, which is a fatty kind of a coating. and this fatty coating allows us to insert the melittin toxin into this particle here. they would be all over this thing. exactly. pogue: this outer layer holds the deadly bee poison in place. it's like a holster that keeps a gun safe until it's drawn. every tumor cell has a distinct chemical makeup. the outer layer of the nanobee is programmed to selectively lock on to only those cells that need to be destroyed. so, if you take this balloon as a cancer cell, this nanoparticle will come up next to the cancer cell and basically merge with it. the coating will come off, and the melittin itself forms a hole in the cancer cell and pops it. pogue: like its namesake, a nanobee can sting only once. so swarms of them are required for any treatment. sam's lab has decoded the chemical makeup of the bee venom so he can manufacture it in large quantities for his nanobee swarms. i say good-bye to our beekeeping hosts in order to pay a visit to sam's lab at washington university to see how the nanobees work in the body. wickline: so here we are in the magnetic resonance imaging suite. i'm going to show you what it's like to be a patient as if we were looking for nanobees inside of you. and may i just say what a boost this gives my dignity to wear a sundress and slide into a giant bagel. well, let's go toast you. pogue: an mri uses strong magnetic fields and radio waves to detect certain molecules in the body. hi, come on in. pogue: this machine has been tuned to detect fluorine atoms, which are part of the nanobee molecules but are otherwise very rare in the body. wickline: okay, you having fun in there yet? we're rolling. pogue: i think i remember this ride. i think i did it at six flags. pogue: if sam had actually injected nanobees into me-- and if i had the cancer that they'd been trained to fight... you're going to start hearing some noise. pogue: ...they would travel in my bloodstream and stick to any target tissue they encounter. the images that the technicians see would show bright yellow areas where the individual nanobees were finding and killing the diseased cells. and best of all, there would be no toxic side effects as with traditional chemotherapy. pogue: so, sam, how far away are we from using nanobees in everyday human cancer patients? well, now this material is being tested in what's called preclinical stage. and we hope that within about a year or so that we'll have approval to test this in humans. well, thanks, sam. i appreciate this experiment. so, typically how long would you leave the patient, uh, lying in this tube? guys? guys? hello? hello? pogue: like the nano-scale transistors that came before them, nanobees get their power from their tiny size. but nanobees and other emerging nano technologies go even further. wickline: so this is where melittin is made. pogue: nanobees are part of a new breed of small materials that self-assemble. no need for big complicated machinery to make nanobees. put the right ingredients together in the right conditions and they make themselves. this revolution in medicine, working at the tiniest of scales, would never have been possible without the revolution in electronics that preceded it. both are transforming our world and our lives at an astonishing speed. as we see the power in this new ability to design and build atom by atom, there may be no more important goal in the science of materials than mastering the art of making stuff smaller. biodegradable plastics... we've gone from this to this. a new approach to fuel cell cars. here it is, folks, the future of american hydrogen storage. host david pogue investigates new materials on the cutting edge of clean. seems like a scene from willy wonka. oh, look at this! the soy foam is taking over! the soy-based seat cushions are performing well at 40 miles an hour. major funding for rnova is provided by the following: we know why we're here... to chart a greener path in the air and in our factories. man: to find cleaner, more efficient ways to power flight. and harness our technology for new energy solutions. around the globe, the people of boeing are working together to build a better tomorrow. that's why we're here. supporting nova and promoting public understanding of science. and the corporation for public broadcasting and: major funding for "making stuff" is provided by the national science foundation. additional funding by: ♪ ["we shall overcome" ♪ we shall overcome ♪ vo: kennedy tried to talk the aders out of the march ♪ oh, deep in our hearts vo: we have to put an end to segregation ♪ i do believe vo: we have to have a national protest and we need to do it now. ♪ we shall all have peace, lord, lord one day ♪ ♪ yeah yeah yeah yeah the exploration continues on nova's website, where you can watch this and other nova programs, see expert interviews, interactives, video extras and more. follow nova on facebook and twitter, and find us online at pbs.org/nova. captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org this nova program is available on dvd and blu-ray at shoppbs.org, or call 1-800-play-pbs. i'm susie gharib with a "nightly business report" news brief. no clarity from the federal reserve today about when the central bank might begin pulling back on the massive bond buying stimul stimulus measures. that uncertainty led to wild swings in the stock market. the dow was lower for the sixth session in a row falling 105 points ending below the level. the nasdaq lost 13 points, the s&p off by nine points. hewlett packard netted $1.5 billion profit in the last quarter but sales of pcs fell 8%. sales of existing homes in july shot up 6.5%, far more than expected but wells fargo is laying off 2,300 mortgage lending workers with a drop in refinancing. be sure to tune into >> rose: welcome to the program. it's summertime, and we're looking back at some of the our most interesting conversations with the past year. tonight, we return to our recent conversation with kate blanchet. she stars in the latest film by woody allen "blue jasmine." >> it's also a wonderful australian playwright who unfortunately passed away, nick enwright. i encountered him at drama school, a very, very dear and special man. he went around table in our first year and said why are you here? and what do you want-- why are you an actor? and no one said it, but he said, "well, i actually--" we always came up with selfish reasons, and he said i think acting reveals what it is to be human. and it is a hell thing, and that's why i maybe keep doing it because it's-- it humanizes me. >> rose: kate branchet for the hour, next. captioning sponsored by rose communications >> rose: kate blanchet is here. she is an academy award-inning actress. in "the aviator" she was kate hepburn. in i'm not there she was bob kill an, in woody allen's new movie, kate plays a woman on the verge. david benbee of the "new yorker" calls it "most complicated and demanding performance of her movie career." here is the trailer for "blue jasmine. let. >> what do you think? >> i love it! you spoil me so. >> who else am i going to spoil? >> he met me at a party and swept me off my feet. >> i fell in love with the name jasmine. >> no, i have never been to san francisco. i'll be staying with my sister. >> jasmine. look at you! >> your place is homey. >> the flight was bumpy. the food was awful. you'd think first class. >> i thought you were tapped out. >> i'm dead broke. really. i mean the government took everything. >> all i can say is you look great. >> oh, now who's lying? >> is there anything you want that you don't have? >> sweetheart, it's beautiful. >> when your sister had all that money she wanted nothing to do with you. now that she's broke all of a sudden she's moving in. >> she's not just broke. she's all screwed up. >> excuse me, are you talking to me. >> one minute you're on top of the world, the next, the guy turned out to be a crook. >> how long are you planning on staying with ginger? >> no one wants to get out of here as a matter o as a matter . >> i'm sure this is a big comedown for you. >> i want to to know i lost every cent of my own money. >> i was