Janelle Shane

A speck of dust, viewed under the electron microscope. Looks a bit to me like a pirouetting bison. The dust is definitely microscopic - about 40 of these would fit inside your average skin cell. It’s sitting on the metal holder we use for mounting our samples - all

Could this be the creature who’s been clambering all over my sample, raking scratches into my designs, cackling all the while? I sometimes wonder. … Or maybe it’s actually a speck of dust, as usual. This one’s large for a dust particle, but still invisible to the human

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

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

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