It has nowhere near the pulling power of tractor beams envisaged in science fiction, but the first long-distance optical tractor beam has so far moved particles one fifth of a millimetre in diameter a distance of up to 20cm.
An Atlético victory would have aided their city rivals Real but Diego Simeone had insisted his team would not lie down; instead they would challenge "for every ball as if it was the last," fighting for "every millimetre on the pitch", and so it proved.
And while a pain nerve has a sensory jurisdiction of roughly a millimetre, an itch nerve can pick up disturbances on the skin over three inches away.
Ordinary light microscopes cannot, however, resolve objects smaller than about 200 nanometres (nm, or millionths of a millimetre), or approximately half the wavelength of visible red light, so anything of this size or smaller appears blurred.
One bride found a great strapless bra with not quite enough stickiness, so she covered every last millimetre of the inside of the cups in tit tape (double-sided tape for the body) as insurance.
The top-down approach generates layers a twentieth to a tenth of a millimetre thick.
Dendrochronology establishes the age and provenance of the wood; three-dimensional X-rays show up exactly how thick and dense it is, millimetre by millimetre; and spectrometers reveal the composition of the varnish.
Candescent's cones, made of molybdenum, are less than a millionth of a metre high and are placed about a millimetre away from the phosphors on the screen.Motorola, another company at the conference, is also interested in field-emission, but it has a more esoteric idea for creating the micro-guns.
Even the normal humidity of the atmosphere takes its toll on the distance these so-called millimetre waves can travel.
Once the container is spinning at the correct speed (typically a few revolutions per minute), the mercury spreads out to form a layer less than a millimetre thick, and in such a way that variations in the thickness of the mercury layer compensate for the imperfect shape of the container.
Since nothing can travel faster than light, adding the remaining 0.14% would require an infinite amount of energy, which means there is plenty of scope for doing better.Dr Byer did so by shunting the newly arrived electrons into a narrow channel between two glass plates, each half a millimetre long.
