Everything is made of something.

The ability to design, synthesize and measure materials with picometer resolution represents an emerging, final frontier in materials science.  Whereas the past two decades have seen remarkable advances in nanoscience and engineering, in which materials are designed and engineered at the 1-100 nm length scale via the control of clusters of atoms, we are now in an era of picoscale materials development, where picometer-scale distortions, including manipulation and control of subtle bond configurations between individual atoms, strongly modify functional behavior in the solid state.  This can result in materials having properties that do not exist in nature.  Picoscience offers the ultimate length scale to engineer materials, since distortions smaller than a single picometer become too small to alter macroscopic material properties.