Hurray! World’s smallest electric motor invented, possibly (Wired UK) http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-09/05/worlds-smallest-electrical-motor

The chemists discovered that by controlling the temperature of the molecule, they could change the speed of the rotations. At around 5 Kelvin, or about minus 450 degrees Fahrenheit, the rotations slowed to the point that they were able to record them (around 50 revolutions per second).”For every single data point in the paper, about 5,000 of these [rotations] were counted [by two separate people],” Sykes says. “You collect data for five minutes, but it takes a week to analyse the data.”

Not the first time its been done, but the first discrete design. Cool stuff.