Wired Magazine // Shadow Science

     Lenox Laser is a highly focused specialty engineering company, the self-proclaimed leader in small-hole technology. If you want small holes punched through something, Lenox, based in Glen Arm, Maryland, is the place to go. The company's Web site is awash with air slits, conflats (don't ask), calibrated gaskets, orifices both standard and customized, luers (see conflats), filters, and all that is holey.

     If the people at Lenox don't already make what you want, they'll be happy to do a custom job - they're quite proud of having drilled a hole through FDR's eye on a dime as a publicity stunt. But they've rarely heard anything as strange as a 1999 request from NASA's Ames Research Center for a stainless steel plate, pierced by a precisely described but seemingly random array of 1,600 holes, some as small as three-thousandths of a millimeter, or 3 microns, in diameter.

     A man named Bill Borucki wanted Lenox to make him a starry sky. A little one, to practice with...

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