World's Tiniest Race Cars Will Cover 100 Nanometers in 36 Hours

Models of the six nanoscale "vehicles" that will be competing this April. (Credit: CNRS) Four racing teams from around the world will gather in France this spring to compete for a first-of-its-kind title. Their vehicles will "inch" to the starting line and explode into motion to kick off a marathon 36-hour race that will have covered less than the width of a human hair by the time a victor is crowned. The vehicles participating in the race are custom-built tuners assembled out of a few hundred atoms by researchers, which are propelled across the surface of a gold disk by a stream of electrons. The NanoCarsRace is the brainchild of two French researchers with the French National Center for Scientific Research, and adds some high-octane thrills to the fairly serious discipline of manipulating particles on the atomic scale.