Experiment Where Scientists locate one atom in 10 Octillion
 

In the search for neutrinoless double beta decay, scientists at Stanford's Enriched Xenon Labs are trying to find a single atom in 10^28 atoms. Which is crazy.
symmetry breaking Blog Archive Finding 1 atom in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Forgive me for nerding out, but this is really cool. Admittedly, I'm no physicist, but this experiment might change the way we look at elementary particle physics. That's a big deal.

Also, how often do we get to use the term "octillion" with impunity? Rarely.

It is pretty cool, being able to see one decay out of so many atoms. Even doing things like moving individual atoms around to draw pictures (like the IBM logo the first time someone did this back in the late '80's) still amazes me.

I guess octillion is usable. For instance, one octillion water molecules is only around 66 pounds, so the average person would drink around 0.06 octillion water molecules each day. Granted you would get some funny looks if you asked someone for an octillion atomic mass units of water (a bit under four pounds, I think).