A cup of hot green tea! Imaged at 10 microns using a thermal camera. In this picture, the hottest areas show up as the lightest. The tea’s near boiling, so it’s much brighter than everything else in the photo - the room in the background fades into the dark

It’s just water. Cold water on a warm hand, to be exact. This is an image from an infrared camera I was testing today. It turns out that humans glow in infrared, exactly in the same way that a red-hot piece of iron glows in visible light. We’

Here’s another view of the sample I posted earlier, the one that was so wonderfully, spectacularly ruined. This time I’ve zoomed in near the very edge of the chip, where the vast plain of laser material abruptly ends at a jagged cliff. By the time I was looking

Check it out - we made opal! My labmate Lindsay Freeman [http://emerald.ucsd.edu/Members/Lindsay.html] made this thin layer of opal on glass, and this is what it ends up looking like under a microscope - crazy patterns and planes of swirled color, some areas calm, some areas highly

I was pretty sure this was going to be another doomed sample. For one, none of those little mesas and bumps - all formed of semiconductor laser material - were supposed to be there. It was all very interesting-looking, but it meant that some kind of junk had gotten on my