Number 297 (Story #5), November 27, 1996 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein A NANOTUBE HAS BEEN USED AS A MICROSCOPE PROBE. Richard Smalley at Rice University has managed to glue single carbon nanotubes (several microns long but only 5-20 nm wide) to the tips of scanning tunneling microscopes and scanning force microscopes. The resulting probes are conductive (good for STM), reproducible, and sturdy (good for SFM) since they flex instead of snapping when they make contact with atoms in the sample. (Hongjie Dai et al., Nature, 14 November 1996.)