PHOTO: National institute of standards and technology

Engineers at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology and George Mason University, in Fairfax, Va., say they’ve made what’s probably the world’s smallest microwave oven. The device can heat a pinhead-size drop of liquid within an oven chamber that’s about half as wide as a single hair and a little shorter than an ant. They built the oven as part of a lab-on-a-chip for performing DNA forensics and other complex biochemical analyses on very small samples of material.