Bench Press

A completed magnetometer.

The age old dilemma of magnetic resonsance imaging: do you sacrifice precision for size, or size for precision?

Generally, behemoth MR machines are required to produce images of great detail. The downside? Price, immobility, and an inability to take the device to the field. The tradeoff of using their smaller, less expensive counterparts, however, is their lackluster resolving power. This could all change with John Kitching’s new developments in MR technology. Kitching, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is working on smaller, less expensive MR machines with resolutions that rival their larger cousins. Taking a new spin on an old idea, Kitching has adapted the procedure of producing atomic magnetometers and taken it to a significantly smaller scale.

The result: highly sensitive magnetic sensors about the size of a grain of rice. Kitching believes that mass production is not too far off in the horizon, and with an army of tiny magnetic sensors, the possibilites are endless. Pocket-sized MRIs, anyone?