Have you ever looked at a textbook diagram of the chemical bonds that make up molecules and thought to yourself, "This is just a dumb drawing -- how do they know what it even looks like in real life?" Well stop it. Stop it right now. Felix Fischer of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is going to show you what it looks like with these gorgeous high-resolution images of individual carbon atoms linking together. And guess what? They look just like they do in the textbooks. Happy now?

Here's a fun fact about IBM's research on storing data atom by atom -- sometimes, it gets really boring. Our latest evidence for this phenomenon is that the folks working on the project feel like making the world's tiniest stop-motion film is a better use of their time, and I'm not going to say that they're wrong. The result of their efforts at atomic animation is this short, A Boy and His Atom.