dust - AI Weirdness

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By Janelle Shane On August 26, 2015 - 1 min read

ucresearch: How Dust Is Holding Science BackTo most of us dust is just something we clean off our furniture, but to scientists dust can cause big problems in the lab. Computer chips are put together and tested in what are called clean rooms. These environments use filters to limit the

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By Janelle Shane On April 14, 2014 - 1 min read

Sometimes the view under an electron microscope can be positively scary. I’ll be scrolling along at low magnification, checking out some nanoscale features, when all of a sudden a colossus will loom huge above the nanolandscape. Sometimes I actually jump. Usually it’s a tiny microscopic speck of dust,

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By Janelle Shane On October 31, 2013 - 1 min read

A ghost? This is a speck of dust sitting on a metal surface, seen close to the edge of a piece of tape - the tape is the weird lumpy surface looming over the whole scene. The ghostly figure (it looks to me a bit like a panda) may be

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By Janelle Shane On October 17, 2013 - 2 min read

Even when working in the cleanroom, a little dust is hard to avoid. This is a gallery of electron microscope pictures of dust specks I’ve encountered while making nanoscale devices in the UCSD Nano3 cleanrooms. Dust is made of a variety of materials - dead skin cells, tiny bits

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By Janelle Shane On October 14, 2013 - 1 min read

I found an area of strange mesa-like structures on one of my samples - near this spot, the sample broke, scattering tiny fragments of glass and laser material across that part of the sample’s surface. After I used high-energy plasma to etch most of the laser material away, the

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By Janelle Shane On October 13, 2013 - 1 min read

Nanosouffle? This piece of dust appears to have partially deflated. I’m not sure if it really did crumple, or if it’s just a trick of the angle. The light-colored platform it’s sitting on is all semiconductor laser material, that the dust protected from the high-energy plasma that

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By Janelle Shane On September 29, 2013 - 1 min read

A speck of dust sits on a pedestal - this is a smallish piece of dust, only about 1/100 the thickness of an average human hair. The dust made its own pedestal by protecting a small area from the high-energy plasma that I was using to etch away the

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By Janelle Shane On September 09, 2013 - 1 min read

Here’s another example of what happens when dust lands on my sample just before the etching phase. The giant wing-like airy structure is the dust - due to the odd way nanoscale forces work, this fragile thing remains upright and intact even after the sample’s tilted and jostled.

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By Janelle Shane On August 29, 2013 - 1 min read

Dust again! One of the amazingly varied forms that a single speck of dust can take - they turn from specks to angular mountains, billowing sails, or fluffy clouds. This one’s darker, smoother, and sharper than most… my guess would be that it’s maybe a microscopic shard of

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By Janelle Shane On August 22, 2013 - 1 min read

This is a single speck of dust, viewed at 14,000x under an electron microscope. It’s small enough that it would fit easily inside one of your cells. My lab builds most of our nanostructures in cleanrooms, designed to keep out dust like this… compared to the size of

Tag: dust

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