AI Weirdness: the strange side of machine learning

Tag: science art

Total 76 Posts
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A “perfectly clean” surface… This sample looked clean and shiny when I held it up to the light - I had cleaned it several times in harsh solvents like acetone, and even blasted it with high-energy plasma for a good ten minutes.  Under the electron microscope, I learned the real
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Tiny nanostructures.  If you stacked a thousand of the largest one on top of each other, they would just about equal the thickness of a single sheet of paper.  And then you should tell me how you managed to do it - maybe we could write a paper together. These
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A speck of dust, viewed under the electron microscope.  Looks a bit to me like a pirouetting bison.  The dust is definitely microscopic - about 40 of these would fit inside your average skin cell.  It’s sitting on the metal holder we use for mounting our samples - all
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Could this be the creature who’s been clambering all over my sample, raking scratches into my designs, cackling all the while?  I sometimes wonder. … Or maybe it’s actually a speck of dust, as usual.  This one’s large for a dust particle, but still invisible to the human
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These canyonlands, viewed under an electron microscope, are about a billion times smaller than the real thing - it’s strange how features repeat themselves on such vastly different scales. In this picture, the landscape is made of semiconductor laser material, with the features etched away from a smooth plain
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The Lonely Mountain, home to nanodragons.  The surface of this sample is coated with a rough, mountainous substance - likely created when the top layer of my sample (a photoresist) didn’t hold up well to a reactive plasma that I was shooting at the sample.  One bit of the
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Soap bubble-like rainbow colors means that this sample has a thin film of something on it, just like a soap bubble or oily puddle.  The colors change quickly, so there’s probably a ton of variation in the thickness of the coating - in fact, the rainbow stripes are packed
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A bit of string appears to bend space.  This phenomenon is called “charging”, and can cause strange effects in scanning electron beam microscope images. What’s going on?  To make a scanning electron microscope image, we literally scan a beam of electrons across our sample and detect the electrons that
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Extreme close-up of a single speck of dust.  It turns out that dust comes in all shapes and sizes, and this cloud-shaped piece is a rarity - I’ve also found mountains and sails and lumpy monsters.  None of which are supposed to be there… but when I take my
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A dream landscape, formed naturally by defects in a thin polymer film.  This phenomenon is called Newton’s Rings, and is the same sort of thin-film effect that makes soap bubbles iridescent.
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