bw - AI Weirdness (Page 5)

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

String! I definitely wasn’t expecting to see this - it startled me when I first came across it, partly because it was looping up dramatically into midair before it sagged, as I watched, under the glare of the microscope’s electron beam. It came to rest draped over one

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By Janelle Shane On September 10, 2013 - 1 min read

Looking like architectural columns, these structures are more than two million times shorter than their life-sized counterparts. Put another way, they’re only knee-high to a bacterium - the only way we can see them is with a powerful electron microscope. We’re not making buildings with these structures, but

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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 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 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 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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By Janelle Shane On August 16, 2013 - 1 min read

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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