A team of physicists at the University of California at Berkeley have taken nanotechnology to new levels with the creation of a radio 10,000 times thinner than a human hair, capable of receiving either AM or FM transmissions. This makes it 100 billion times smaller than the first commercial radios, and a thousand times smaller than today's smallest radios, built with silicon chips. Individual radio components have been built on the nanoscale as far back as ten years ago, but Professor Alex Zettl and his colleagues were the first to get a single nanotube to function as antenna, tuner, amplifier and demodulator. The key to their success was adopting a different approach from conventional radios, which convert radio waves directly into electrical pulses. The Berkeley radio instead absorbs transmissions and physically vibrates, much like the tiny hairlike structures in the human ear. It is created out of a single carbon nanotube, an immensely strong compound consisting of carbon atoms linked in a chicken-wire-shaped structure, which can be formed into tubes. Funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, the Zettl's team has no commercial partners yet, but practical applications could include climate-monitoring systems and probes designed to travel through the human bloodstream. This is at least theoretically possible because the nanoradio not only receives signals, but can transmit them as well.