Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been used to investigate soft bodily tissues for diagnostic purposes for over 40 years. Current machines can resolve structures to about 0.1 millimeters—a figure that has remained relatively stable in recent years. A team of physicists have designed a small MRI machine that was able to detect a structure over one million times smaller: a single hydrogen atom. It is hoped that this technology will eventually be used to determine the structure of specific molecules. The research was led by Christian Degen of ETH Zurich and the paper was published in Science.