- [Narrator] Let's face it,
slim can indeed be sexy. But when it comes to
thinness, there's a point when it becomes apparent
that you can no longer slim down any further. You're at the end of
shedding those pounds. A boundary, where things
won't even be visible enough to be considered three-dimensional. Join me as we step into
and over this boundary, with the top 10 thinnest things that are almost unbelievable. - Amazing. - [Narrator] Number 10, Achernar. This is something that's
not actually thin by our puny human standards, but is
worth mentioning simply due to its very bizarre appearance and form. Achernar is actually a
star, the dominant one within the binary star
system Alpha Eridani. It's classified as one of the
hottest and brightest stars in our night sky. This particular celestial
giant made it onto this list because it's one of the flattest
stars known in existence. Wait, what? It's true. The star has an unusually
rapid rotational velocity, which causes an equatorial
bulge due to centrifugal force. At 250 kilometers a second,
it basically bulges out so much on its equator that
it resembles more like a hot, blue beam than the typical spheroid shape of any average celestial
body of considerable size. To put that into perspective,
Earth, which is described as an oblate spheroid,
has a rotational velocity of .46 kilometers per second. Therefore, Achernar rotates
hundreds of times faster than our floating blue football. And yet our planet isn't
even perfectly round anymore. Achernar even spins 20
times faster than Jupiter, which has the fastest
rotation period of 10 hours in our solar system, still at only 12.6 kilometers a second. Number nine, the Vivo X5 Max. Of course, if thin is the
game, then tech is the name. The competition for
thinnest in consumer tech has been raging on since the early 2000s, and we've progressed quite far since then. In fact, we may have already
created devices so thin that we wouldn't want to go any thinner. I'm talking about none
other than the Vivo X5 Max. Not to sound like some tech
review, but this device currently holds the world record as the thinnest device on the planet. At only 4.75 millimeters
thick, the Vivo X5 Max beats even the two previously
known thinnest smartphones on the planet, the Gionee
Elife S5.1 and the OPPO R5, which are both 5.15 millimeters and 4.85 millimeters respectively. The innards are not bad,
mostly typical for a top-end phone in 2014, but it does
also sport the thinnest screen on record, thanks in part to
the now rapid proliferation of AMOLED screen technology
in the mobile industry. Of course, thinner doesn't
always mean better, as we're yet to see another device beat it in terms of thinness. Maybe it's because thinness
comes at the sacrifice of performance, as the phone
has less space for components like the battery, so it has
well-below-average battery life compared to similar
phones in its price range. Number eight, AONI condoms. When conducting safe, protected
sex, we're often hindered by that very thin veil of dissatisfaction. It's not just the pleasure,
but the feeling of a physical barrier to your love
just makes it a tad bit less intimate for you and your partner. Until the supposed arrival
of ultra-thin condoms, where this next entry shows
off its sheer dominance. The Chinese AONI brand condoms
are rated as the thinnest of the ultra-thin condoms
in the entire world, and are probably one of
the thinnest latex-based products on the planet. According to the company's
advertisement, it is only about .035 millimeters thick,
which is far thinner than a human hair. This was made possible with
a new manufacturing process that is said to be able
to roll out thinner than ultra-thin sheets of prophylactic. For the record, the previous
mark was actually held prior by Japanese company Okamoto, which produced ultra-thin condoms that were about .038 millimeters thick. In fact, the AONI condoms
were officially approved by the Guinness Book of
World Records at the time of its commercial release
for its achievement, which probably says more
about its officiators than I'm allowed to discuss. As they usually say,
ultra-thin for a better, more personal feel, at least for the guys. Number seven, wallpaper TVs. Kicking back in the
realm of consumer tech, another product that is often advertised for its thinness nowadays are TVs. Long gone are the days of
the bulky CRTs, and even LCDs are now considering
taking the dietary plunge thanks to LEDs and other
adaptive technologies. Enter the OLED screen, and the concept of the wallpaper TV, manufactured by LG. The W Series, as it's
known, is pricey, at $20,000 but for that, you do get
a brilliant 4K display that's only .2 inches thick. OLED stands for organic
light-emitting diode, and it's a relatively new
screen technology from the last few decades which utilizes
self-illuminating pixels, rather than backlighting
filters used by LCD screens. This allows wallpaper
TVs to be super-thin, with the screen's holding frame or case being the only limiting factor. In addition, OLED technology
is known to produce very vibrant and rich colors,
something that LCD technology has been struggling to achieve due to its inherent limitations. Granted, OLED screens are much
more expensive to manufacture compared to LCD screens, but
going forward, expect these screens to be the new norm in the future. Number six, Burmese gold leaves. Gold is a very important
cultural aspect of Myanmar. According to the country's
local Buddhist traditions, an offering of gold must be made as part of a religious pilgrimage. But, gold as we know, is a precious metal. If each person is required to
offer gold as part of their state religion's rituals,
then how can everyone do it? The answer is to distribute
gold in the most efficient way possible, and luckily this
is possible because gold is the most ductile of all
metals, so we can flatten it, with a lot of work. The Burmese use a small lump
of gold, just under 2 ounces, or 50 grams in weight, and
put it through an extruder to mold it into a
20-foot-long ribbon of gold. The strip is then cut
into four, and then each five-foot piece is cut into 200 pieces. Each piece is then placed
between pages of bamboo paper, like a book, and then
repeatedly hammered for half an hour by a six-pound hammer. Each piece is then cut into
six to turn the 200 pieces into 1,200 pieces of gold. This process is then repeated
another three times so that they can then cut each square into three. What originally started out
as a two-ounce gold bullion is transformed into over
14,400 tiny gold leaf squares, each around one to two inches in diameter. The small pieces are pressed
into paper and then sold cheaply to anyone who wishes to make an offering to Buddha. Each piece is around
0.6 micrometers thick. That's a thickness of
about 2,000 gold atoms, or over 30 times thinner
than even the thinnest hair. Number five, fairy feather silk. Long ago, in the land of Yamato, in ancient Japan, the
legend of the hagoromo, feathered kimonos of tennin,
enthralled aristocrats throughout the centuries. The famed feather mantle, as
it was known, was the primary garment of the celestial tennin, the spirits of Buddhist
religion and culture. Today, the Japanese might be
familiar with a similar garment known as the fairy feather silk. No, this isn't the real
version of the hagoromo, but its exquisite quality makes it almost like the real thing. Developed by the Saiei-Orimono
Company, the very thin cloth veil is known as the
thinnest silk in the world. It's well known for its
translucent, almost ethereal look, as if it's a garment that
cannot be touched directly. As for its actual specs,
the thinness of the silk is what obviously gives
it its ghastly appearance. But more specifically, a
fairy feather silk thread is measured at around a
sixth of the thickness of a human hair. That's right, you need
six separate fairy feather silk threads just to match
the thickness of a human hair. When layers of it are draped
in a coordinated manner, it forms an array of beautiful
and captivating patterns. Wearers of fairy feather
silk wardrobes might even mimic the tennin themselves,
flying in the breeze of its fascinating visual appeal. Number 4, Japanese paper and wood. Paper and word are two
materials that, despite coming from a similar source, are
typically very different from each other. What if we then push the
boundaries and make these two things as thin as they can get? We go back again to Japan to
visit the home of the thinnest wood and paper in the world. A kanna is a Japanese carpentry
tool that can be masterfully used to shave ultra-thin
strips out of a wood material. Thin, in the sense that
the wood itself takes on an entirely different identity. After being shaved, it becomes
more like a strip of foam, soft, and wraps around
the hand like a cloth. On the paper side, the
tenguchoushi at a glance looks like an ordinary roll of plastic cover. But it's really just a long
roll of very, very thin paper. A company named Hidaka
Washo is the brainchild of this invention. Made via a secret
traditional Japanese method, each sheet is carefully manufactured, and can be used for a wide
variety of local applications, most importantly for
preserving very delicate historical documents. How thin are the kanna-sliced wood and tenguchoushi paper exactly? The finest slice of shaved wood
is around .008 millimeters, while the tenguchoushi paper is rated at about .02 millimeters. The human hair, as compared
once again, is more than six times as thick as the
wood, and more than twice as thick as the paper. Number three, IBM's five-nanometer chips. Of course, a list on the
thinnest things always needs to have at least one entry
from Big Blue itself. This time, it's the
company's five-nanometer silicon chip architecture. The world's very first
five-nanometer chip finally came to life when it was first
unveiled in June last year. With its tiny size, it's
easily several thousand magnitudes smaller than a human hair. Why is this such an important milestone? Because this size threshold
comes very, very close to the ultimate size
limit of a transistor. In other words, we're
getting into the very limits of shrinking down silicon
chip technology with it, bringing about the apparent
end of the famous Moore's Law. I'm not going to discuss
all of its implications, but do take note, IBM
promotes these new chips as at least 40 to 75% better
in computing and power efficiency, respectively,
compared to their current best counterparts on the consumer market. For those of you who aren't
familiar with our present generation of data processing
chips, we're currently at the 10-nanometer scale. This should put the upcoming
five-nanometer chips into a better perspective. Number two, nanoplates. Nanoplates are very, very
thin sheets of single compound or element materials that are designed for various specific purposes. The first functional version
of its kind was developed by scientists at the University
of Pennsylvania in 2015, which was primarily
made of aluminum oxide. At 25 to 100 nanometers
thick, the nanoplates were reportedly several thousand
times thinner than a sheet of paper and hundreds of times
thinner than aluminum foil. Due to its ability to
spring back into shape even under considerable deformity,
it has promising applications in the field of aviation and aeronautics, where lightweight designs always meet durability and flexibility. Number one, graphene. Much like nanoplates,
graphene is similar in nature but it's already popular
in its applications today. But in its thinnest form,
it's a one-atom thick sheet of pure carbon. Yes, one single atom thick. That's as thin as anything can get. It has been heavily touted
over the last few decades as the miracle material that
can solve practically anything, with an exhaustive list
of potential applications that mainly include,
instantaneous device charging, data transfer speeds several hundred times faster than today, phenomenally
efficient liquid filters, literally unbreakable touchscreens, bionics that naturally meld into the body, space propulsive systems
better than ion drives, an entirely new type of screen technology. And lots, lots more. It's advertised as the
be-all end-all solution to all of our 21st-century
technology woes. That is, of course, if we can
find a way to mass produce the material, which is a
whole new different challenge for our current generation of scientists and researchers to consider. Which was the most fascinating
thinnest object one the list? Do you know any more
amazing and phenomenal thinnest objects out there? Let me know in the comments down below. And thanks for watching. (upbeat music)
