Rectangular forms jut out of smooth surface. Courtesy Thomas Eiden, Undergraduate, UW-Madison Department of Nuclear Engineering.

Despite being merely microns thick, these impurity crystals jut like skyscrapers from the surface of NF 616 cast stainless steel, a specialized engineering material. All engineering materials contain small amounts of impurities, which play an important role in the mechanical properties of the material. This image was captured with a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM).

Courtesy Thomas Eiden, Undergraduate, UW-Madison Department of Nuclear Engineering

Snout of a butterfly

This CSI is a scanning electron micrograph of the snout of a butterfly. Conveniently coiled when not in use, the long proboscises of butterflies are used to drink and obtain nectar and other nutrients from flowers. This pretty picture was obtained with the aid of a scanning electron microscope, a microscope that scans a specimen with a directed, machine-gun-like stream of electrons — negatively charged particles that are scanned in similar ways to make your TV and computer screens come alive. In a scanning electron microscope, the energy and wavelength of the electrons can be used to provide depth of field and high resolution, a nifty feat that provide three-dimensional definition of very small structures. Such a microscope can magnify things from 10 to 300,000 times.

You can see an entire gallery of CSIs like this — and more — by going to Hawaii. Watch out for the micro aliens!

A special thanks to award-winning photomicrographer Dennis Kunkel who let us use this awesome picture.

All images are owned and copyrighted by Dennis Kunkel and are protected by the United States Copyright Law.

Stinkbug

Fair arthropod, we hardly knew thee! Ladies and gents, meet the stinkbug, here for all to admire in a rare close- up.

We Why Filers did not take this shot. We wouldn’t dare. After all, the vermin has earned its name: When handled or disturbed, stinkbugs produce a sweet, pungent odor from glands in the thorax. It scares away predators, and as far as we can tell, journalists too.

No, we owe this addition to the insect family album to Tina Carvalho, AKA MicroAngela, of the Pacific Biomedical Research Center at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Carvalho photographs her subjects (which range from dust particles to insect eyeballs) using a high-resolution electron microscope. These dandy instruments use a beam of electrons as the source of illumination (as opposed to the traditional beam of light used in traditional microscopes). Because electron beams have shorter wavelengths than beams of light, they make it possible to see things at higher magnification and resolution.

It’s just the tool for folks like Carvalho, who like to dress up little things. Once an electron microscope image allows her to see intricate features of her subject, she digitizes them and colorizes the images with special software designed to enhance rather than cover up details that the microscope has revealed.

We’ll leave the job to her, in this case.

Image courtesy MicroAngela.