Mouldy cup

Last week I was at a conference. When I came back to work I found my coffee mug looking like the image above. Obviously something needed to be done. The first thing was of course to extract some mould and put it under the microscope. 

In an optical microscope a network of fibres can be seen. To have a closer look one can but a piece of the mould into the SEM. Then we see this.

Lots of tiny cells clinging to some long fibre like structures. A closer view can look like this.

or like this

Yeah, yeah... the colouring of that last image is a bit hopeless... I was tired. 

I really like these flower-like ends of the fibres.

Apparently mould is really beautiful close up. Another reason not to be too fast with washing your coffee-mug.

Hugging crystals

We have a new scanning electron microscope at work. This is an image of two interleaved crystals of hopeite on a zinc surface.

Stars?

I took the picture above a few days ago. I thought it was very similar to an image I had seen at the Bad Astronomer of a globular star cluster (see below). Somewhat fewer stars, but definetly similar. However, the difference in scale is about 21 orders of magnitude. My image shows silver particles electrodeposited by a colleague on an ITO electrode. The width of the "cluster" is roughly 100 µm. It's a dark field microscope image which is why the particles appear as diamonds, or stars, on a dark background.

M9 by Hubble.

Gold particles

A picture from work. This shows dendrites of gold nanoparticles. The tree-like structures were formed when a homogeneous layer of nanoparticles were moved by the surface tension of an evaporating liquid. The picture was taken using dark field microscopy in polarised light. The shiny part up in the left corner are crystals of KCl. The whole image is about 1 mm across.
A bonus image below from another part of the sample.