For scale, a strand of human hair is 100,000 nanometers wide.
It is about 250 nanometers in diameter, among the smallest known microbes.
But at nanometer-size scales for water and potentially other fluids, whether the container is made of glass or plastic does make a significant difference.
The tip -- about 40 nanometers in diameter -- was then lifted up and the measurements continued.
They found that they could control the atoms independently when they were spaced just a nanometer apart.
The metasurfaces accomplish the same task using silicon nanoposts, cylinders just 600 nanometers tall and with varying diameters in the hundreds of nanometers.
A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and a human hair is about 100,000 nanometers thick.
A nanometer is one billionth of a meter and roughly 1000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.
