These canyonlands, viewed under an electron microscope, are about a billion times smaller than the real thing - it’s strange how features repeat themselves on such vastly different scales. In this picture, the landscape is made of semiconductor laser material, with the features etched away from a smooth plain by

The Lonely Mountain, home to nanodragons. The surface of this sample is coated with a rough, mountainous substance - likely created when the top layer of my sample (a photoresist) didn’t hold up well to a reactive plasma that I was shooting at the sample. One bit of the rough

Soap bubble-like rainbow colors means that this sample has a thin film of something on it, just like a soap bubble or oily puddle. The colors change quickly, so there’s probably a ton of variation in the thickness of the coating - in fact, the rainbow stripes are packed

A bit of string appears to bend space. This phenomenon is called “charging”, and can cause strange effects in scanning electron beam microscope images. What’s going on? To make a scanning electron microscope image, we literally scan a beam of electrons across our sample and detect the electrons that

Extreme close-up of a single speck of dust. It turns out that dust comes in all shapes and sizes, and this cloud-shaped piece is a rarity - I’ve also found mountains and sails and lumpy monsters. None of which are supposed to be there… but when I take