For every job, there is an appropriate tool. If you want to weigh yourself, you hop on the bathroom scales; if you’re looking to measure out some flour or sugar, you use a smaller version from the kitchen. Scientists in the lab have their own, hypersensitive scales, capable of measuring down to an individual thousandth-of-a-gram – but what if you need to go smaller than that? The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Weighing individual cells – some of the tiniest things in the world – can require some outside-the-box thinking. So how have researchers managed it?

Turns out, there’s a few options.

Mathing it out

It was 200-odd BCE, and Archimedes had a problem. The new king, Hieron II, had commissioned a new crown from a smith

See Full Page