Could make awesome computers.

Materials scientists who work with nano-sized components have developed ways of working with their vanishingly small materials. But what if you could get your components to assemble themselves into different structures without actually handling them at all?

Verner Håkonsen works with cubes so tiny that nearly 5 billion of them could fit on a pinhead.

He cooks up the cubes in the NTNU NanoLab, in a weird-looking glass flask with three necks on the top using a mixture of chemicals and special soap.