Presented by Lauren Zarzar, Nicholas Schade, and Adam Marblestone

Everything that we can see, small, taste and touch is made of matter. For the first ten thousand years of human development, we crudely shaped matter (like metal and wood) into forms that we could use. In the last two hundred years, humanity has learned to manipulate matter to create exotic substances that could not be found in nature, but continued to mold those substances into shape using macroscopic tools. Now, scientists are programming matter at the molecular level to make shapes too small to see with the naked eye in order to create machines that carry drugs into cells, surfaces that can change their properties in response to temperature, or cloaks that can bend light around them, masking the object underneath.