U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan helped inaugurate a special science lab in the Chicago area Thursdayand attended a separate event promoting more rigorous learning standards.

Wheeling High School officials say their nanotechnology lab is the first of its kind in a U.S. public high school.

Teacher Nancy Heintz says the labs high-powered microscopes can drill down to the nano level. How small is that? Think of the Lincoln Memorial on the back side of a penny, she says.

If you imagined the eyelash on the Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the penny that gets you pretty close to the nano level.

Heintz says teachers were able to see single atoms of copper when they came to learn how to use the scanning electron microscopes and atomic force microscopes over the summer.

On Thursday, students showed off images of things theyd seen close up: butterfly wings, strands of hair, a DVD.

Senior Bryan Zaremba was impressed by paper. It looks almost like a spider web, you can see all the fibers, he said.

This is zoomed in at 3,300 times, so its pretty small, explained his lab partner, Eric Kaplan. On the computer screen was an image that looked more like a gray, post-apocalyptic forest than a scrap from someones notebook.

Next to Zaremba was a scanning electron microscope which looks like a large desktop computer tower. Theres a crystal in here that shoots electrons down at a sample, and when the electrons hit the sample, they bounce back to detectors, and they build an image, Zaremba says.

See more here:

Small is big at new nanotechnology lab in Wheeling