science - AI Weirdness (Page 8)

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By Janelle Shane On September 06, 2013 - 1 min read

Three views of the same flasks of fluorescent rhodamine dye. At the far right is a picture of how the flasks look under regular room lights. In the middle, the scene is illuminated by a UV-emitting flashlight (otherwise known as a blacklight). Under this strong, high-energy illumination, the fluorescence from

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By Janelle Shane On September 04, 2013 - 1 min read

A high-resolution zoomed view of one of my samples - all these weird natural-looking pillars means that there was some serious micromasking going on. Micromasking is what happens when I’m trying to etch away a material by bombarding it with high-energy plasma, and little particles of dust or oil

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By Janelle Shane On September 01, 2013 - 1 min read

A nano-landscape, made of dark strips of laser-melted areas, interspersed with brighter less-damaged regions. I’m not sure what the mountain is made of - maybe even the melted remains of a dust speck. You’d have to stack a thousand of the mountains on top of each other to

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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 28, 2013 - 1 min read

Nanosilverfish? Someone asked me to post a picture of what one of my nanosamples should look like - one that doesn’t have nanofluff or nanozombies or other weird etching/dust problems. The reason I haven’t posted one before is that they look kinda boring - when everything goes

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By Janelle Shane On August 25, 2013 - 1 min read

Nano Boba Fett? This is an artifact made of semiconductor laser material, that appeared during a process meant to etch all the laser material away. Probably it was formed by a speck of dust landing in that spot and protecting the material underneath from the etching plasma… the remnants of

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By Janelle Shane On August 24, 2013 - 1 min read

A microscope image of a beat-up-looking sample that was abandoned in one of our storage boxes. It looks like maybe it used to have some kind of coating on it, which has deteriorated, or maybe the coating never came out well in the first place, which would be why it

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By Janelle Shane On August 23, 2013 - 1 min read

Plasma in a box! We use this machine to etch silicon by blasting it with high-energy plasma, and the machine’s makers were kind enough to include a little viewport in the side so you can look in and see the plasma. It’s this pretty glowing blue-violet color… one

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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

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By Janelle Shane On August 21, 2013 - 1 min read

Nature repeats itself on a small scale - These mesas and plateaus are only about 500 nanometers high… if you stacked 2,000 of them on top of each other, they’d just be a millimeter high. How did this happen? The entire landscape is made of laser material, which

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