On Simhat Torah we conclude the reading of the Torah and start again from the beginning. But what if your Torah is too small to see with the naked eye? Or even with a magnifying glass?

Researchers from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have produced just such a Torah. It contains all 308,428 words of Tanakh—the Five Books of the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings—in Hebrew on 0.5 square millimeters, an area the size of a sugar crystal. Using cutting-edge nanotechnology, it took Ohad Zohar and his team at the Technion only 90 minutes to create the mini-Torah. A focused ion beam generator shot gallium ions onto a gold surface that covered a layer of silicon. The ion beam removed bits of the gold, thereby exposing the darker silicon underneath and leaving an inscription.

“This is the world’s tiniest Bible,” boasts Zohar. “The Guinness Book of World Records has a Bible 50 times bigger.” The text of the “nano-Bible,” as they call it, must be  enlarged 10,000 times by a scanning electron microscope to be readable by the naked eye.