Aquatic Antenna by Daniel Torelli. A ladybug antenna, pictured upside down. Torelli’s goal when he created this image, he says, “was to show the public what the world around them looks like on a microscale.” Torelli is an undergraduate in the Department of Chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences. Equipment: Environmental scanning electron microscope.

Chrome Labyrinth by Michael Woodson. Millions of tiny wrinkles formed when Woodson layered a sheet of chromium (0.1 micrometers thick) over a layer of acrylic polymer and heated the two together. “The formation of these patterns was totally accidental,” he says, “and actually caused a fair amount of trouble for me.” The wrinkles tend to be parallel and spaced almost equally, and the distance between them varies — higher temperatures make larger wrinkles that are spaced farther apart. The reason the wrinkles form is a mystery, he says, but it could be because the different materials expand in different ways when heated, or because the way the chromium layer is deposited puts some stress on it. Woodson is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences. Equipment: Motic PSM-1000 microscope.

The Sarlacc by Adam Shields. This ant’s spiracle, or air hole, is thirty-five microns wide — smaller than the width of a human hair. The opening leads to the ant’s respiratory system, a network of hollow tubes that runs throughout its body. “To a nerdy physicist,” Shields says, “this image was reminiscent of the Sarlacc, the tentacled desert monster in Star Wars that Jabba the Hutt tries to use to execute Luke Skywalker, by slow digestion over a thousand years.” Shields is a doctoral student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences. Equipment: Scanning electron microscope.