The invention has been touted in Science magazine and lauded on National Public Radio (NPR). It's not the latest software innovation, not the next generation cell phone, but tweezers. The familiar tool has been modified in an innovative way to aid the study of microscopic objects.

The "nanotweezers" are thousands of times smaller than the conventional eyebrow-pulling tweezers. Hyman Professor of Chemistry Charles M. Lieber developed them to manipulate and study objects as small as several atoms.

Lieber and Philip Kim, who was a doctoral student in chemistry last year, published the results last week in Science.

"We started making just one toolkit that will help others develop real nano-technologies," Kim said. "This is just a first step."

Nanotechnology involves building miniature tools from individual molecular structures that can manipulate other small molecules.

The nanotweezers have two carbon tubes that can grasp molecules.

In an NPR interview last week, Lieber compared nanotweezers to human-sized pliers.

"If you were trying to build something with a hammer and nails or screws and things, you could use a screwdriver or something to push nails around on the piece of wood," Lieber said. "But if you didn't have a pliers to lift them up...you couldn't actually hammer the nail in."