Nanobama

John Hart & colleagues, Nanobama

These 3-D portraits are smaller than a grain of salt. Each "nanobama" is a vertical stack of about 150 million carbon nanotubes, unusually strong hollow cylinders about 1/50,000th the width of a human hair.

University of Michigan professor John Hart and his colleagues began by converting Shepard Fairey's iconic red, white and blue poster of Barack Obama to a line drawing. They shrunk the drawing and printed it on a glass plate with a laser. Then they shined ultraviolet light through the glass plate on to a silicon wafer to create a pattern on which to grow the carbon nanotubes.

View more of Hart's nano-art at www.nanobliss.com.