Imagine unloading a pile of bricks onto the ground and watching the bricks assemble themselves into a level, straight wall in only a few minutes. While merely a fantasy for builders in the everyday world, these types of self-assembled structures are a reality for those who build materials in the nanoworld. Michael C. Tringides, a senior physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory, has shown that nanoscale "straight wall" lead islands on silicon are spontaneously and quickly created by unusually mobile atoms.