The world's smallest periodic table

Engineers have inscribed the periodic table on a shaft of hair snipped from the frizzy mop of Nottingham University's Martyn Poliakoff. The feat was accomplished using a gallium ion beam in a scanning electron microscope to knock off tiny flakes of the chemist's hair shaft, etching in the abbreviations for the 118 elements.

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The table measures 89.67 microns across and 46.39 microns from the top of helium all the way to the bottom of lawrencium, small enough to fit a million of them onto a Post-it note, the chemistry professor notes in the video above. While a cool feat in and of itself, the video accomplishes the goal of illustrating how nanowriting is done. Check it out.

More chemistry in the spotlight:

• Harry Potter and the Periodic Table
• Chemistry you can dance to
• Chemistry steps out of the shadows
• The 2011 Weird Science Awards

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).