Lone protein molecule could tip this scale

From Los Angeles, at a meeting of the American Physical Society

Physicists developing exquisitely fine-tuned scales for weighing tiny objects have reached an important milestone—a device sensitive enough to detect individual molecules of biologically active proteins.

To make their protein scale, Michael L. Roukes of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and his colleagues fashioned bacterium-size bridges of silicon carbide, a durable semiconducting compound, onto microchips.