By Lance Ulanoff2014-04-25 13:30:33 UTC

At the intersection of nano technology and 3D printing lies IBM's Microscopic 3D Printer, which now holds the distinction of printing the smallest magazine cover in the world.

IBM and National Geographic Kids unveiled the cover, which is small enough to fit on a single grain of salt 2,000 times, at the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington, D.C., where The Guinness Book of World Records officially proclaimed it as the world's smallest magazine cover.

The gray-scale duplication of NatGeo Kids' cover is actually invisible to the naked eye. Dr. Colin Rawlings, a physicist at IBM Research, said that even with a microscope, you'd only be able to make our a blurry image. To see it in full, you need an electron microscope.

The National Geographic Kids nano-printed cover (left) alongside the original.

IBM used a special kind of nano-printer which, unlike traditional 3D printers that print layer-by-layer, removes material to create its work. The silicon tip of the nano-printer reaches 1,000 degrees Celsius and literally vaporizes the material in this case, a polymer to create indents of varying depths, depending on the light qualities of each pixel in the original scanned image. Put simply, the nano tip, which is many thousands of times smaller than the tip of a pencil, carves away at the surface to create the final 3D product. It took about 10 minutes to print the black and white replica of the National Geographic Kids cover.

The tiny cover is a fun demonstration of the micro 3D printers capabilities, but its true purpose lies elsewhere. Rawlings said that the printer, which is now being used commercially at the University of McGill in Canada, is a perfect tool for rapid prototyping.

"Scientists make a lot of mistakes so being able to prototype things quickly and accurately is really important and thats what this lets you do," he said.

Ultimately, the printer could be used to work out the pathways for future processors. IBM's own newly introduced high-end mainframe processor the Power8, uses a 22 nanometer production process. The micro printer can go as low as 8 nanometers. Ostensibly, this means, the printer is ready to prototype a road map for the future of processors.

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IBM 3D Prints World's Smallest Magazine Cover