Our recent post showing vinyl records at 1000x magnification was pretty popular, and many of you had ideas for things you’d like seen under a scanning electron microscope.

ASPEX, a company that manufactures scanning electron microscopes (SEM), recently launched a “Send Us Your Sample!” campaign. All you need to do is fill out a form and send it into the company with the sample you’d like photographed, and the company will publish the resulting photograph online and notify you via email when it’s up.

The photographs above show the torn edges of a piece of paper. You can see previously completed requests in this gallery.

(via Boing Boing)

Ever wonder what a vinyl record looks like under an electron microscope? Okay, probably not. Luckily, there’s people who do, including Chris Supranowitz, who created a number of electron microscope images for a course at the University of Rochester.

Here’s a photograph of the record grooves captured by Supranowitz at 500x magnification. Those dark chunks you see are dust particles.

This one was shot at 1000x magnification. The record begins to look like the Grand Canyon.

These images were created in the Spring of 2005 for the course Opt 307/407: Practical Electron Microscopy and Advanced Topics. Other projects used the electron microscope to examine such things as snowflakes and bird feathers.

To see more of the amazing images captured by Supranowitz, check out the final project page.

(via Reckon)