The 15 best electron microscope images of 2011

Thursday, August 4, 2011 - 6:44am

There's a whole world out there that we're incapable of seeing without the aid of very complicated an expensive electronics. On the large scale, we're talking about looking at the universe through telescopes, but it works the other way, too, using things like electron microscopes to explore the inherent beauty of the very, very small.

FEI, a company from Oregon that makes electron microscopes, sponsors a contest every year to find the best electron microscope images. In the gallery below, you'll find the top three pics plus six honorable mentions, and we've gone through the entries and included some of our favorites too. If you want to take a look at the rest of the submissions, they're all available in desktop wallpaper-sized versions on Flickr here.

FEI, via Gizmodo

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Honorable mention: "partially dried red blood cells clotted on the cotton fibers of a gauze wound dressing. Imaged at low vacuum to avoid charging of cotton fibers." [Source]

First place: "microcrack in steel after bending test, colored afterward." [Source]

Second place: "capillary net of an alveola showing the erythrocytes within the blood vessels." [Source]

Third place: "forepart of a mite." [Source]

Honorable mention: "these structures are defective capacitors of a Silicon chip. Polysilicon top plates present different gray levels: This is an illustration of Passive Voltage Contrast, the polysilicon top plates are charged up by the primary e-beam and this charge amount is modulated by different capacitor leakage levels." [Source]