World's smallest radio - here comes the nanopod

It's the world's smallest radio, run with a single carbon nanotube one ten-thousandth the diameter of a human hair, and radio buffs are already dubbing it the nanopod. A single battery and earphones are all you need to tune in with the radio, built by physicists at the University of California in Berkeley, a paper published online Wednesday by the journal Nano Letters said. The nanoradio, currently only a receiver, is 100 billion times smaller than the first commercial radios, and the physicists began building it to mark the 100th anniversary last year of the first voice and music radio transmission. "We were just in ecstasy when this worked," said team leader Professor Alex Zettl. "It was fantastic." The radio, which could also work as a transmitter, has any number of applications - from cell phones to microscopic devices that sense the environment and relay information via radio signals, Zettl said. "The nanotube radio may lead to radical new applications, such as radio-controlled devices small enough to exist in a human's bloodstream," the paper said. Nanotubes are rolled-up sheets of interlocked carbon atoms that form a tube so strong that some scientists have suggested using a nanotube wire to tether satellites in a fixed position above the earth.