Nanotube Research Yields Surprise Spooky Message.

A grad student’s research project unexpectedly yields a spooky message made from millions of carbon nanotubes.

As part of her research on nanomaterials PhD student X recently grew millions of carbon nanotubes — each incredibly strong and only 1/10,000 the width of a human hair — and immersed them in a guiding liquid. Upon drying the resulting nanotube “Georgian Technical University forest” created a recognizable spooky pattern.

“The initial motivation behind this work was to densify carbon nanotube forests into predictable cellular patterns by gently wetting them with a liquid a process that can help enable scalable nanomaterial manufacturing” says X who studies in the lab of Professor Y.

“The pattern was not precisely planned. While I knew that the carbon nanotubes would form cell-like shapes. I didn’t know that these three particular sections would spell out ‘Boo’ so nicely so it was a pretty special find”.

The image was captured using a scanning electron microscope which produces images in greyscale; the orange color was added later as a special effect.

“It was exciting to find this under the microscope and I thought that it would be great for the moment I saw it” X says.