Scientists Inscribe Tiny Bible

Israeli scientists have crammed the entire Hebrew Bible onto a chip that is half the size of a grain of sugar, the AP reports. They used a particle beam to etch it onto the 0.01-square inch surface “like a hammer and chisel," one scientist said. The new Bible appears to be the world’s smallest; the previous record holder, reportedly from Australia, ran 1,514 pages and measured about an inch high.

Today's version got the entire 300,000-word text onto one gold-covered, silicon, pinhead-sized chip. A team of scientists at the Haifa Institute of Technology will display it beside beside a huge wall enlargement to arouse interest in nanoscience, the BBC reports. The technique will one day be used to save masses of DNA and bio-molecule data. (More nanotechnology stories.)