Tag: Newsletter

A ghost? This is a speck of dust sitting on a metal surface, seen close to the edge of a piece of tape - the tape is the weird lumpy surface looming over the whole scene. The ghostly figure (it looks to me a bit like a panda) may be a

16 Incredible Animals and Landscapes You Can Only See With a Microscope [ https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fgizmodo.com%2F16-incredible-animals-and-landscapes-you-can-only-see-w-1452211741&t=ZTU0ZTEwZjVmNzU3Njg5MTdjMmJmZTJkNjM3OWY1M2Q0OTdkMmJhOSxCanloNXFuVA%3D%3D&b=t%3AIinBpZOgiMHH_bphj7hrOQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Faiweirdness.

The broken edge of a piece of semiconductor laser material, viewed at 2,402x under an electron microscope. At this magnification, it’s clear that the edge isn’t cleanly broken at all, but has all sorts of furrows and ripples, all invisible to the naked eye, making it look

Even when working in the cleanroom, a little dust is hard to avoid. This is a gallery of electron microscope pictures of dust specks I’ve encountered while making nanoscale devices in the UCSD Nano3 cleanrooms. Dust is made of a variety of materials - dead skin cells, tiny bits of

I found an area of strange mesa-like structures on one of my samples - near this spot, the sample broke, scattering tiny fragments of glass and laser material across that part of the sample’s surface. After I used high-energy plasma to etch most of the laser material away,

Nanosouffle? This piece of dust appears to have partially deflated. I’m not sure if it really did crumple, or if it’s just a trick of the angle. The light-colored platform it’s sitting on is all semiconductor laser material, that the dust protected from the high-energy

Closeup of artificial opal, formed on fragments of microscope slides by drying little plastic beads. Everywhere that the beads happened to assemble themselves into regular arrays as they dried, you get iridescent rainbow colors - the “fire” of opal. The rainbow iridescence comes from the interference of light waves as they

This is a bit of clear rubbery silicone with a gold-coated hologram on the top. The patterns are little microchannels where liquid can flow across the surface of the silicone; the larger round areas are where hollow needles can be poked in from the other side of the silicone

More strange naturalistic formations in a sample where the plasma etching went really, really wrong. This was supposed to be flat, empty, and perfectly smooth. Actually, it still looks that way under anything but an electron microscope… an ant could step on this and not even notice. It’s plenty,

A speck of dust sits on a pedestal - this is a smallish piece of dust, only about 1/100 the thickness of an average human hair. The dust made its own pedestal by protecting a small area from the high-energy plasma that I was using to etch away the