Say hello to the very first photograph of a pentacene molecule (or any molecule for that matter) taken by scientists at IBM using an atomic force microscope (AFM). The molecule is said to be a million times smaller than a grain of sand.



Do you know what's shockingly weird and awesome about this picture? Remember the balls and sticks that we once used to build models that represented the structure of molecules in our high school and/or college chemistry classes? Well, here's the balls-and-sticks model of the pentacene molecule.  This is how scientists thought a pentacene molecule would look long before the first snapshot of this molecule was taken:



Need I say more?


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