Scientists have made a pair of tweezers capable of picking up objects just 500 nanometers (billionths of a meter) across. The achievement is being hailed as another milestone in the fast-developing field of nanotechnology in which researchers manipulate matter at the scale of individual atoms and molecules. The nanotweezers could become an important part of the toolkit that one day allows us to create a host of molecular-scale devices with extremely miniaturised electronic circuitry.