Technology's aim these days is to make things smaller and faster. And LED hasn't been left out of that agenda. Last month, LG announced they made an OLED TV as thin as a magazine. Now, these things are about to get even smaller!

The folks from the University of Washington built the world's thinnest possible LED for use as a light source in electronics. It is just three atoms thick. I don't even know how else to describe this, but that is really bloody tiny.

"These are 10,000 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair, yet the light they emit can be seen by standard measurement equipment," said Jason Ross, a UW materials scientist and graduate student who helped with the research. "This is a huge leap of miniaturization of technology, and because it's a semiconductor, you can do almost everything with it that is possible with existing, three-dimensional silicon technologies."

Can you even see it? We wonder. The new LED is so thin it is flexible and strong at the same time. They are not even considered to be three dimensional objects, and they are made out of a the semiconductor tungsten diselenide in a process borrowing from a Nobel-Prize winning method for extracting flakes of graphene.

[UW]