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The field's brilliant minds, however, have yet to match the manufacturing capabilities of diatoms. For one thing, a human-made nanostructure is generally made in two dimensions with components added in layers or by the delicate etching of pieces of silica into usable shapes—one laborious piece at a time.

The work of diatoms, however, takes place in three dimensions. They produce their shells in a seemingly infinite variety of ornate shapes like individual snowflakes, so dazzling that the arrangement of diatoms has been an art form, albeit an obscure one, practiced since Victorian times by very patient people using microscopes and single-hair brushes.

More interesting for Hildebrand's purposes, though, is that diatoms form their intricate, glasslike shells by the millions in mere minutes. This is where the nanotechnology payoff may lie.

"There is a general fabrication ability of diatoms that we can't even approach," he said. "If we wanted to, in the course of a week, we could get them to make over a billion copies of a particular structure for probably less than a dollar per batch."

The size of the pores in diatom shells fluctuates with basic environmental changes like the salinity of the seawater. If that size and other traits could be reliably controlled, manufacturers could create new compounds or truly space-age polymers. For instance, the silica shells could house laser dye to create microlasers, devices to do the work of common lasers on a much finer scale than is now possible.