Smallist

Here’s 6 H₂O molecules stuck together in what’s the smallest possible crystal of ice. Or if you’re being cute about it, the smallest snowflake. Scientists were able to get the image using a scanning tunneling microscope to photograph a metallic surface at 5 degrees above absolute zero. They even had to turn down the microscope’s electron beam to the lowest setting, lest the individual electrons disturb the crystal.

The research will help explain how water can form on different surfaces, and how it interacts simultaneously with the atoms of the surface and the other water molecules. Plus it touches on the nucleation processes which create clouds and rain. The study is available here.

I’ve covered most of these at some point, but if you haven’t seen some, here’s a nice roundup of 5 tiny prefabs.

Don’t you wish you could tighten nuts without carrying around a toolbelt like Schneider from One Day at a Time? Maybe then you could get somewhere with Bonnie Franklin. Well, now you can carry a wrench set in your wallet. Suave.

Engadget had this funny picture of future iphones, accompanying a rumor that cheaper iPhone versions will be coming after the initial success. Meanwhile, Merlin Mann is completely sick of iPhone talk. Will the tech world survive the next week?

Toys + (suburban optimism * body parts) + time = creepy. Grace Weston knows this equation and exploits it mercilessly in her artwork. Her site quotes a reviewer saying “all in hyper-crisp focus,” but I think some of the fun here is the shallow focus of a macro lens. Lovely stuff. Via Neatorama.

Via Treehugger, this nifty wind turbine will charge your cellphone in 1-2 hours. Perfect for camping in a windy but not-so-sunny spot.

Jack PCsits right in your wall socket. It runs Windows CE, has 4 USB ports, and 128 MB of ram. The chip should run at the equivalent speed of a 1.2 ghz computer, although it’s an AMD RISC chip. And it runs IE 6, which sounds a little behind the times (no firefox?), but that oughta be enough to run web applications. 200 pounds will get you one.

It’s so power-efficient, it can also be powered directly from an ethernet jack. More information here.

The Megatech Avion is a plane small enough to fly your home, and presumably light enough to fly near a ming vase. Watch the video, for no other reason than that the accompanying music is like aural xanax.

Via Engadget.

The next best thing to the iPhone might just be Opera Mini, a new free browser for cellphones. It has the same zoom-in to the page effect (minus the animation) as the iPhone Safari browser, and their website sports an Mac / PC parody ad, which wasted about thirty seconds of my life.

Sink Positive has emailed me to correct the fact that the depicted product here is not theirs. It’s true: The real Sink positive has a trapezoidal bowl and was featured in NY Magazine here.