graduate school - AI Weirdness

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

Nano Street Fight Electron microscope image submitted by grad student Rajat Sharma of UCSD, who looked unsuccessfully with another grad student for a Brad Pitt-esque central character, before giving up and declaring the fight a total mess. They were testing the etching conditions for making a series of tiny uniform

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By Janelle Shane On March 27, 2014 - 1 min read

ThorLabs displays a keen understanding of graduate school - as of a few years ago, they’ve included snack boxes with many of their orders of optics components. The boxes include things like trail mix, granola bars, goldfish crackers, and fruit snacks - not, of course, that this influences any

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By Janelle Shane On July 02, 2013 - 1 min read

This entire view would fit easily inside a single cell. The “lake” is a crater with glass at the bottom - being an insulator, glass tends to build up charge that deflects the electron beam my microscope fires at the sample, so very little bounces back… it appears dark. The

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

The lace ship. This is some sort of dust that landed on my sample before etching - I do try to clean dust off, but I don’t get everything removed. This particular sample had a few of these airy, lacy dust particles - I’m not sure what they

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By Janelle Shane On June 27, 2013 - 1 min read

Nom nom. Apparently, my nanostructures are tasty. This little guy is only about 1 micrometer high, less than 1/100 the thickness of a typical piece of paper. And the guy appears to have latched on to one of my little structures - ruining it, I might add. I guess

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

Here’s the jagged edge where my sample broke. I blame the carbon tape, which is usually my friend, a nice way to get rid of those pesky extra electrons, and a way to stop my sample from falling off the holder in the electron microscope. Except this time, the

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

Here’s carbon tape putting on a show again. This is the most commonplace part of scanning electron microscope imaging - and in my opinion, one of the most consistently cool-looking. We use carbon tape because it’s conductive, and stops electric charge from building up on the samples we’

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By Janelle Shane On June 12, 2013 - 1 min read

Sometimes the most interesting part of electron microscopy is the carbon tape. It’s basically just conductive tape, and we use it to stick our samples to their little metal holders before we put them in the microscope. To the eye, it’s jet black and lightly textured. Under the

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

A cup of hot green tea! Imaged at 10 microns using a thermal camera. In this picture, the hottest areas show up as the lightest. The tea’s near boiling, so it’s much brighter than everything else in the photo - the room in the background fades into the

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

It’s a serene sight - a nicely formed wall of laser material (semiconductor InGaAsP, to be exact) stands on a smooth glassy plain. I added the color - it’s not actually cold here. It’s inhospitable in a different sense, though: There isn’t any air. For the

Tag: graduate school

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