If this is the quality of image/post I can consistently expect from io9, Gizmodo is going to get a serious run for its Gawker-ad-hits from my mouse.

Awesome.

I fear the day when I have an emergency MRI (for some ungodly reason) and the nano-bots and their nano-materials go all nuclear in my blood stream.

Curious if these explosions could cause a greater chain reaction if they were in an (in)appropriate environment.

That's such a weird image that I have a hard time believing that it's not a photochop.

What are all those microscopic DC-10's full of Thetans doing down there?

@GibGirl: Seriously. I'm with you. It looks EXTREMELY suspicious. Differing resolutions, weird colorizations, and that the explosins look too much like macro-scale explosions?

@Pope John Peeps II: I think it has to be at least colorized, doesn't it?

Electron microscopes shoot electrons at things to see them, instead of light, so there couldn't be any color.

@braak: Well, I know that. But the colourization is part of what makes me suspicious about this picture.

The article says it is "color enhanced" and that the "the template has been subsequently completely etched" so no, it is probably not an electron micrograph of explosions happening. But it sure looks cool.

Check out the article because some of the other photos are really nice too...

Abstract also says "based on simulation studies." Caveat lector.

Looks like they found Bender's nuclear pile.

Something about the quality of this picture leaves me expecting a lolcat version to show up in the near future. "Im in ur magnetic array explodin ur nanos."

These are probably not 'mushroom clouds', but rather solid structures that are the resting state of the array post explosion.

Scanning electron microscope images are black and white, and color is added later ('color enhanced'). This is standard practice, and the color selection thus becomes a kind of artistic expression instead of an attempt at duplicity.

Hey guys? You do get that this blog is... nevermind.

Curious... if you imagine the whole thing as a greyscale picture, then it looks fairly ordinary. But as Porkfish has stated, the color selection does make a huge difference. Let's say you paint the array a soft green hue, the mushroom heads a lively green and the protusions that join both cinnamon...you now have a nano-bonsai forest.

I have a flesticle, one of the new, portable, nano-wired, imberingishly wumped tri-axial variety, newly available on the streets of Silicon Valley. My flesticle, although not yet lithium-ion powered, is potent enough to incrementalize the compartments of reality with the enzymatic blummis for which it is justifiably lauded by the intelligentsia and cognoscenti of three continents.
Yet, young women do not congregate by my front door, literally or psionically. What is to be gleaned from that? My flesticle remains silent on the issue and a bit flaccid, I admit.

Caryatids? I fell forward, into the depths of the N-gate, eyelids swirling photochromically, cataclysmically catalyzing the clave/clavichord/clavicle imbued teratogenically.

Eh, bub?