Playboy Print Shrunk To Hair Size

An picture of a Playboy centrefold has been shrunk down to the breadth of a human hair by scientists in Singapore.

A group from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) printed a colour photo, measuring only 50 micrometres across.

The print is a stand of the mural of Lena Soderberg, a Swedish model, that originally appeared in a 1972 situation of Playboy.

It is a commonly-used picture for contrast copy techniques.

In the biography Nature Nanotechnology, the researchers settled that the device could create colour images of up to 100,000 dots per in. - 10 times as many as a high-end home printer.

The way could be used to print minuscule watermarks or secret messages for safety purposes, mentioned the scientists.

"Our colour-mapping plan produces images with both pointy colour changes and excellent tonal variations, is fair to large-volume colour printing... and could be utilitarian in creation micro-images for security," the group wrote in its investigate paper.

According to Chad Mirkin, a nanotechnology highbrow from Chicago's Northwestern University who was not entangled in the study, the outcome is "approaching the confine of what is probable to print in colour".

If the pixels were brought any closer, light reflecting off them would diffract, causing the two objects to fuzz together.

To get hold of the image, the group used minuscule china and bullion particles, which, when organised in a specific manner, constructed colour.

"This is a intelligent way of formulating preferred colours," mentioned Prof Mirkin.

"Instead of receiving normal dyes and using established printing, they're creation colours out of a element by adjusting nanostructure in a lithographic [a technique to create patterns] experiment.

"They're getting these high-resolution images in a context of colour, and getting the colour in a way not similar from dyes that make up wardrobe or pigments in paint."

He stressed that it was not, however, an allege in high-resolution printing, as there were other techniques that were significantly superior.

For instance, scientists at the University of Nottingham combined a minute mural of the Queen to spot the Diamond Jubilee that was so small it could fit on a typical postage stamp 300,000 times.

Ms Soderberg's picture was initial used as a assessment picture in 1973.

An helper highbrow of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California Signal and Image Processing Institute Alexander Sawchuk was seeking around his lab for an picture to indicate for a colleague's discussion paper.

He longed for a not similar picture from his team's usual assessment images, and when someone came in with a new situation of Playboy, he used the centrefold.

The indicate became a of the many used images in P.C. history, and the model became dubbed the "first woman of the internet".