When it comes to breaking world records, we tend to think of Things like eating the most hot dogs or holding the longest kiss or being the tallest, shortest, or oldest person on the planet. But a team of chemists in Manchester, UK had their sights set on someThing seemingly inconsequential: the tightest knot ever made.

You can't moor a boat, tie up your shoe, or even keep a fish on the line with this particular knot - it's too small. Microscopic, in fact. The world's newest knot is made of a strand of 192 atoms. It's about 200,000 times thinner than a human hair at two millionths of a millimeter wide.

The tightness of a knot is judged by the distance between its crossing points, where the ropes - or in this case, the atoms- cross. In this teeny knot, that distance is only 24 atoms. Check out this video, which shows how the atomic knot makes a triple loop and crosses itself eight times.

David Leigh, professor of chemistry at the University of Manchester is partly responsible for the new record. “We know how revolutionary knotting and weaving were for people in the stone age. It had an impact on clothing, tools, fishing nets, and so on. Maybe we’ll see just as great advantages from being able to do this with molecular strand," he says.

What does that mean, exactly? It's fancy way of saying that a knotted string of atoms "could make a whole new world" of Things possible. Big and small.

See you next week,
Bobby