A particle of dust, viewed at around 19,000x in an electron microscope.

It’s sitting on a little pedestal that it made itself out of my semiconductor laser material - no, I didn’t give it permission. The dust particle selflessly protected that patch of semiconductor from the harsh etching plasma that I was blasting everywhere, and the result is this crazy island-like structure. This thing is small… if about fifty of them were placed side-by-side, they’d be as wide as a single human hair.

Subscribe now