When it comes to the holidays, I say go big or go home.
Travis Casagrande, on the other hand, takes the opposite approach.
The McMaster University research associate created a microscopic gingerbread house, cut and etched out of silicone—complete with defined bricks and decorations, and a Canada flag welcome mat.
Barely taller than the diameter of a human hair, Casagrande’s decoration may be the smallest house ever built—it’s about half the size of one made in France last year.
Visible only in a set of photos published by the Canadian Center for Electron Microscopy (CCEM), the petit pied-a-terre sits like a miniature hat on the flattened head of a snowman, also crafted by Casagrande.
Under intense magnification (and, one can only imagine, stress), the researcher dug out pieces of silicone with a beam of charged gallium ions, which, according to the University, acts as a sort of sandblaster.
“In the construction of the gingerbread house, you don’t really have a sense of the scale until we zoom out and you see it’s on a snowman, which is also extremely tiny,” Casagrande said in a video (below).
“And then you don’t really know what the scale is, either, until you see the [human] hair,” he continued. “And you’re like, ‘Wow, that house is tiny.'”
Casagrande (whose name literally translates to “big house” in Spanish and Italian) made headlines in 2017 when he used the same technique to carve a tiny Canadian flag flying from a pole—inside an almost imperceptible hole in the back of a penny.
This year’s festive decorations—much too small to hang from the Christmas tree—are not intended to be practical. Rather, the project aims to demonstrate the capabilities of the center, a national facility with a suite of equipment used mostly for materials research.
Unlike the optical-lense microscope you used in high school to dissect a frog, the CCEM’s tools use electrons roughly 100,000 times smaller than that of visible light, allowing for far greater magnification.
Casagrande hopes his creation will put people in the holiday spirit, not to mention stir scientific curiosity among the public and other researchers.
“I think projects like this create science curiosity,” he said in a statement. “I think for both children and adults, it’s important to be curious about science. Looking into how this was made leads to more interest in science, and that builds more science literacy, which allows everyone to make better decisions.”
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