Minnesota may be home to some of the world's biggest fish and game, but now, according to the Associated Press, it's also home to the world's biggest nanometers.

The case of the giant nanometers began on February 2 with an Associated Press report on the President's visit to a 3M Corporation plant outside Minneapolis. That report closed with:

"The president and first lady Laura Bush saw a 77-ton diamond turning machine that uses measurements used in nanotechnology, which is in dimensions 10 times smaller than the human hair."

It didn't take long for nanotech cognoscenti to pounce on that gaffe, and on February 9 the AP published a correction. The new story opened with this statement:

"In a Feb. 2 story about President Bush's visit to 3M Corp. to promote American competitiveness, The Associated Press erroneously described the nanotechnology used in a diamond turning machine seen by the president. Nanotechnology is in dimensions 100 times smaller than the human hair, not 10 times smaller."

But they've still got it wrong. According to the National Science Foundation's (NSF) National Nanotechnology Initiative FAQ page, "the width of human hair is approximately 80,000 nanometers". So let's do the math. The upper end of the nanoscale is 100 nanometers, so by the NSF's yardstick, nanotechnology is in dimensions at most 800 times smaller than the human hair.

In the AP's defense, while there's no fudging the definition of a nanometer (a billionth of a meter) there's quite a variation in the width of a human hair. The Internet Foundation, in fact, runs a webpage with 43 entries on the width of the "standard" human hair.

Clearly, some people take this relationship between hair and nanometers very seriously. Perhaps most serious among them is Bharat Bhushan, Ohio Eminent Scholar and the Howard D. Winbigler Professor of mechanical engineering at Ohio State. He's a nanotribologist, one who measures very small things.

"People know a lot about hair," says Bhushan, "but nobody has used an atomic force microscope to really study the structure of hair." Nobody until Bharat Bhushan, that is. The man knows every nanometer of the standard human hair, and isn't afraid to publish his findings.

Hopefully the AP will read his work before they publish another nanotech article.