The smallest cat on record was a male blue point Himalayan-Persian, named Tinker Toy that measured only 7 cm (2.75 in) tall and 19 cm (7.5 in) long when full grown (aged 2.5 years). The unusually tiny feline was owned by Katrina and Scott Forbes (USA) of Taylorville, Illinois, USA. Tinker Toy was born on 25 December 1990 (the runt of six kittens) and died in November 1997 at the age of six.
The stapes or stirrup bone, one of the three auditory ossicles in the middle ear, measures 2.6-3.4 mm (0.1-0.13 in) in length and weighs from 2 to 4.3 mg (0.03- 0.066 grains).
On 20 November 2005 the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa made the first of two touchdowns on asteroid Itokawa in an attempt to collect samples for return to Earth. Itokawa measures just 500 m (1,600 ft) across its longest axis.
The smallest independent country in the world is the State of the Vatican City or Holy See (Stato della Città del Vaticano), an enclave within the city of Rome, Italy. Its sovereignty was recognised by the Italian government under the terms of the Lateran Treaty on 11 February 1929. The enclave has an area of 0.44 km² (0.17 miles²).
In February 2008 NXP Semiconductors (Netherlands) announced its GNS7560 GPS receiver chip. Designed to be incorporated into mobile phones and PDAs, it measures just 3.6 x 2.4 x 0.6 mm and consumes less than 15 mW of power.
Fitting over the lower screen of the DS Lite, the Drum Grip peripheral released for Band Hero DS (Activision, 2009) is the smallest videogame drum kit. The grip, made out of silicone rubber, fits over the Lite’s 133 mm by 73.9 mm (5.2 in x 2.9 in) frame but is not compatible with the original DS or the newer DSI.
The Manned Manoeuvring Unit (MMU), used by astronauts working outside the space shuttle, is 1.24 m (4 ft) tall, 0.83m (2 ft 8 in) wide and 1.12 m (3 ft 8 in) deep and weighs just 109 kg (240 lb). Powered by nitrogren thrusters, it was first used on shuttle mission STS-41-B in February 1984 when astronaut Bruce McCandless manoeuvered up to 100 m (328 ft) away from Challenger.
The smallest entity universally recognised to be a living organism (not everyone considers the slightly smaller nanobes to be alive) is Nanoarchaeum equitans. This minuscule microbe was only discovered in 2002, in a hydrothermal vent on the seafloor off the coast of Iceland, and its cells are only 400 nanometres across. In addition, its genome is only 490,885 nucleotide bases long, which makes it the smallest non-viral genome ever sequenced.
In February 2008, Swedish scientists announced they had captured footage of an electron riding a wave of light shortly after being pulledaway from an atom. Due to the high velocities of electrons as they orbit an atom in around 150 attoseconds, the team had to develop and use attosecond pulses of laser light in a form of ‘flash photography’
The smallest Nintendo home entertainment system is the Wii. Measuring just 44 x 157 x 215 mm, the Wii is much less bulky than any of its other Nintendo predecessors. It is roughly the same width as three DVD boxes stacked together. Also, with a mass of just 1.2 kg, the Wii is lighter than either the Xbox 360 or the PS3.