We do make things on the nanoscale. transistors in your CPU are on the order of 10's of nano, with features in the single nanometer scale. If your talking about MEM's (micro machines, I might have my acronym wrong) then we are still mostly in the micro range, but there has been some nano (i.e. atomic) machine proof of concept work.

another give away is "photographed by a robotic microscope using polarized light". Optical, not so much for nano particles, wavelength is too big. Just because something is small doesn't imply nano. Anyone remember how high temp super conductors were going to change the world? or cold fusion? biotech? just another hot named band wagon.