IBM nanophysicists have made a stop-motion movie using individual atoms — carbon monoxide molecules arranged on a copper substrate and then magnified 100 million times using a scanning tunneling microscope. The molecules remain stationary because they form a bond with the substrate at this extremely low temperature (-268.15° C); each CO molecule stands “on end” so that only one atom is visible.

The result, “A Boy and His Atom,” holds the Guinness world record for the world’s smallest stop-motion film.

07/16/2017 UPDATE: The day I posted this, news broke that researchers have encoded five frames of an 1870s short film into bacterial DNA. (Thanks, Sharon.)