Researchers in France have built a teeny, tiny house. It's just a few micrometers wide, too small for even a mite to fit inside, and demonstrates that a focused ion beam and a small robot can create 3D microstructures with incredible accuracy and precision. "For the first time we were able to realize patterning and assembly with less than two nanometers of accuracy, which is a very important result for the robotics and optical community," Jean-Yves Rauch, a researcher on the project, said in a statement. The work was published recently in the Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology A. First, a thin sheet of silica was placed on the tip of an optical fiber and then an ion beam was used to cut out the shape of the house and its windows. To fold the walls up, the ion beam was used to just score the silica membrane, and once it was thin enough, it folded up 90 degrees all on its own.