Photo Courtesy of Doug Gordon

It may seem strange to shoot a segment for a show called Smaller in Las Vegas, a city where a "small" hotel still has over three thousand rooms, where showgirls' headdresses can weigh over 40 pounds, and where the smiling visages of Donnie and Marie tower ten stories over the Strip

The Making Stuff team was in Vegas, however, for something very small. We were there to crack open the inner workings of every gadget, camera, computer, and TV on the market today.

If you want to see the world's biggest collection of gadgets, then there's only one place to be: the annual Consumer Electronics Show at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Now, there's nothing small about CES itself.  It's the biggest convention Las Vegas sees each year, with over 120,000 people walking over 1.8 million square feet of exhibition space.  The only thing bigger in Vegas may be the portions at an all-you-can eat buffet. 

But everything at CES is powered by some very small stuff.  Nanotechnology is at the heart of everything the average tech user, well, uses.  Thanks to advancements in nano-sized transistors, today's smartphones have more computing power than the entire Apollo space program.  The Library of Congress has nothing on a well-stocked Kindle and an iPod.  Even the newest and thinnest flat-screen TVs are here thanks to nanotechnology, which allows them to be very thin indeed.  (Some of them are so thin you'd be inclined to roll them up in a poster tube.)

With host David Pogue leading the charge, the Stuff team's goal at CES was to find out if any of the over 2,500 exhibitors space could explain how nanotechnology makes their products work.  Plenty of people could tell us what their products do--a digital camera takes pictures, an MP3 player plays music--but very few people could explain how they do those things they do.

 "Far smarter minds than mine are at work on that question," said one humble product manager.  "You'll have to ask our engineer, but he's not here," said one slightly embarrassed PR rep.  My favorite response was from someone who simply could not explain how a Dick Tracy-like watch accessed the Internet.   Her giddy explanation?  "It's magic!"