Electrodes

A couple of years worth of carbon nanotube modified ITO electrodes that I've used in my research. I am not allowed to throw them away, but since they are not reusable there is not really any need to store them in a space wasting sorted manner. Thus, a carton full of electrodes.

Twin towers

A photo of two spectroscopy cuvettes filled with aqueous electrolyte. The cuvettes were used as cells in an electrochromism experiment. I used time-lapse photography to record the process. This photo was taken during the setup of the experiment, but I like the clean style of the photo in its own right.

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.