"Cornell University physicists reported last week that they had used a laser beam to pluck the strings of an invisibly tiny silicon guitar just 10 millionths of a meter long. Each string of the instrument is about 50 nanometers (or billionths of a meter) wide — 100 atoms thick. Human hearing tops out at tones that vibrate at about 20,000 cycles per second. The high-pitched sound of the nanoguitar twanged forth at 40 million cycles per second, putting it 17 octaves above what human ears take for music."