The use of barcodes on products, combined with the computer technology to read and track the subsequent data, has revolutionized inventory control in our society. Barcodes are commonly seen on items as large as automobiles and as small as pieces of candy. But if you need to track a large number of items that are microscopic in size, such as biologically relevant molecules (think genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, etc), then you need very small barcodes. Sufficiently small rods that can be marked as barcodes have been developed by Sheila Nicewarner-Peña, Griffith Freeman, Brian Reiss, Lin He, David Peña, Ian Walton, Remy Cromer, Christine Keating, and Michael Natan.