If, one morning, a colleague of yours storms into the office and claims that he/she can handwrite a letter–sized page in less than ten seconds, you might be puzzled at first.  If they then claim that they will use a pen with the tip the size of a volleyball, you would think that the colleague has either forgotten to drink their morning espresso, or has already sipped a few too many.

In their latest publication Fenwick et al. demonstrate that what seems impossible at the macroscale often makes perfect sense if everything is shrunk by a few orders of magnitude.  Amazingly, they thermally induce the polymerization of sub-28-nm poly(p-phenylene vinylene) features using a 5 µm-diameter wire.  This paper is not only a great demonstration of nanometer patterning of a semiconducting polymer, but it also challenges the commonly–accepted notion that the limiting factor for feature size is the probe diameter.  Countless publications contain statements such as “better results might be obtained through the use of…sharper tips” (the latter being from a paper of mine).  This work seems to suggest otherwise—it doesn't matter how sharp your tip is, but how cleverly you use it.