Drag along a row or column of a face to turn that layer. Drag the space around the cube to look around it; pinch or scroll to zoom. Double-tap the background to go back to the first view. Disassemble on a scrambled cube solves it first.
Designed atom by atom in diamond: about 270,000 atoms, carbon and hydrogen, with the stickers’ colours made from nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, phosphorus and sulfur. Each of the 26 pieces is built by explicit rules from whole units of the diamond lattice, then relaxed with a force field (UFF). The core spins on K. Eric Drexler’s overlap-repulsion bearing. Disassemble shows how the pieces go together, each one moved by a factory’s fingers along a path checked for collisions.
The colours are a pun. Each face’s sticker is made of an element whose colour in chemistry’s standard CPK scheme for atoms matches a Rubik’s cube: hydrogen white, sulfur yellow, oxygen red, phosphorus orange, nitrogen blue, fluorine green. The real cube would have no colour at all: 13 nm is far smaller than the wavelengths of visible light, so it reflects next to none, and even scaled up, a coating one atom thick would be invisible.
This is a design and a simulation: nobody can yet build anything like it. In simulation at room temperature, a layer takes about 15–30 nN at its edge to start turning, and a face about 74 nN to pull loose: the faces cling together by van der Waals forces, the same attraction between flat surfaces that lets a gecko’s feet hold it to a ceiling. After that, 10–15 nN holds it on. The logo’s chemistry holds to 100 °C.