Deep in the heart of south-central Wisconsin, there lives a scientist who would prefer to remain nameless and (nearly) faceless.  We will call him Yoe. Yoe the Scientist   Yoe is a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is interested in transforming the nature of matter. Yoe is also interested in things that are very small. He combines these interests by researching nanowires made of the element silicon. Before we dive any deeper, let’s talk about what the heck “nano” means. “Nano” usually refers to things that have one dimension (height, width, etc) of 1-100 nanometers. This is around 100 to 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. SMALL! A nanowire is simply a wire whose diameter is around 100 nanometers or less.  A human hair could be called a “microwire,” since its average diameter is around 100 micrometers. Scanning electron micrograph of a human hair. Via The University of Wales Bioimaging Laboratory.   Yoe makes his silicon nanowires by a method that seems truly crazy to me. Not crazy in the “extremely dangerous” sense of the word (though his method is not without danger), but crazy in the “extremely awesome” sense of the word. First, he takes a chemical called silicon oxide and puts it in a long ceramic tube. He then heats the tube up to 1200 degrees Celsius (2,200 degrees Fahrenheit!) and flows a steady stream of hydrogen gas (4% in argon) through...