Editing Monowire (section)

== Real Life ==
Obsidian blades can have edges that are only a few hundreds of atoms wide, while the sensor needle of scanning tunneling microscopes tapers down to a single atom at the tip.  STM's aren't very useful as weapons, but obsidian was and is a choice material for making extremely sharp arrowheads and knives -- obsidian scalpels can be so thin that they slice right through nerve cells, allowing incisions to be made without requiring anesthesia.  Many an archeologist has reached a hand into a cache of artifacts and only realized that there were obsidian blades inside when said hand came out with several fresh cuts. First hand accounts tell that the Aztec Macuahuitl (which had obsidian blades) could kill a horse in one blow. Of course, obsidian is so sharp because it's a type of volcanic "''glass''", so it very brittle and breaks quickly. Of course if you want to leave bits of glass in a wound to make the target bleed out faster that's a good thing, but against armor? especially steel? It's not.

Some would have you believe that katanas are sub-mono-molecularly sharp (cf. [[Katanas are Underpowered in d20]]). They are wrong.