TORONTO -- While some people prefer to show off their massive decorative holiday displays, a researcher at McMaster University prefers to show his festive spirit on a much smaller scale.
Travis Casagrande, a research associate at the school’s Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy, used an electron microscope to create a “gingerbread house” complete with a wreath above the doorway, Canadian flag for a welcome mat and the school’s logo on the roof.
In a phone interview, he told CTVNews.ca that two years ago, everyone had loved it when he used similar techniques to make a miniature Canadian flag on a penny.
“(The point now) was to generate a lot of reaction from this,” Casagrande said, explaining fun, novel stunts can help stir up interest in science.
As with other scientific experiments, he hopes this one will help lead to “better scientific literacy” for future scientists.
“We were thinking of doing another outreach project and the holidays are a great opportunity for that,” Casagrande said in a video describing the project.
The whole design sits atop a snowman that Casagrande also created. Both of the figures have a combined width equal to a single human hair.
The gingerbread house is believed to be the smallest ever created but he said it only took him “two very long work days.”
“You don’t really have a sense of the scale until we zoom out (and) you see it’s on a snowman, which is also extremely tiny, and then you don’t really know the scale until you see the hair and you realize: ‘Wow, that house is tiny.’” Casagrande said.
He told CTVNews.ca he added the snowman element because he wanted to “take it to the next level … I wanted to have some sort of jaw-dropping moment at the end of the video.”
The gingerbread house is made from silicon, while the snowman is made from a material used in lithium-ion batteries. Using the electron microscope, Casagrande was able to zoom-in extremely close to these base materials and used a beam of charged gallium ions to carve out the intricate details.
Electron microscopes use an electron beam for a source of illumination and can achieve up to 10,000,000 times magnification, compared to a light microscope’s max of about 2,000 times magnification.
Casagrande said that the gingerbread house is actually 20,000 times smaller than a normal gingerbread house.
He added that the making of the gingerbread house incorporated many of the techniques he uses in the lab every day – as well as some he experimented with for the first time.
The Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy has such 10 microscopes, which are capable of taking images of a single atom. They are typically used at the school for materials research in both the academic and commercial fields.
Casagrande hopes project like his own inspires children to pursue a career in the sciences.
“I think projects like this create science curiosity,” Casagrande said in a news release. “I think for both children and adults, it’s important to be curious about science. Looking into how this was made leads to more interest in science, and that builds more science literacy, which allows everyone to make better decisions.”
