microscopy - AI Weirdness

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By Janelle Shane On November 12, 2015 - 1 min read

Looks like a slanted surface of Martian desert cliffs, but this is actually an extreme closeup of a human hair. Nanoresearchers who try to describe their research often up comparing their devices to the size of a human hair - for good reason. At about 100 micrometers thick, a human

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By Janelle Shane On August 29, 2015 - 1 min read

These are microscopic balls of tin, imaged under scanning electron microscope (SEM) at 2500x (about 25x more magnification than the strongest optical microscope can manage). These very cool-looking tin samples are good for looking at when you’re trying to calibrate the SEM to produce the best images possible -

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By Janelle Shane On May 19, 2014 - 1 min read

A strange landscape with an even stranger sky. This is a microscope view of the edge of a smooth chunk of silicon, coated with a thin clear plasticy layer of photoresist. Just like the colors in a soap bubble, this colorless thin layer produces rainbow colors due to the wave

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By Janelle Shane On January 23, 2014 - 1 min read

Microscopic fracture patterns appear clifflike on the edge of one of my samples. This entire view is less than 10 micrometers high, meaning that it covers about a tenth the thickness of a typical human hair. We usually don’t get patterns like these, because we use a special wafer

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By Janelle Shane On December 15, 2013 - 1 min read

There aren’t any dyes or pigments in this photo - all this color is due to the wave nature of light. Thin transparent films produce rainbows, when light waves bouncing off the top and the bottom of the film interfere with each other on the way back. It’s

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

Thin transparent films produce rainbows - an effect due to the wave nature of light (the same effect that gives soap bubbles their rainbow colors). Here, the thin film might be photoresist or dried residue from some sort of solvent, like acetone. I’ll probably never know, since this wasn’

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

This one looked to me like a line of people, standing at attention. It’s actually an edge-on view of a comb-like grating structure, seen here as it passes between two rectangular alignment markers. The people-like shape is due to the weird way the plasma etcher ate away the semiconductor,

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By Janelle Shane On November 07, 2013 - 1 min read

There are no dyes or pigments in this microscope image - it’s a thin clear film on a blank mirrorlike surface, and all the colors come from the interference of light waves. It’s the same effect that produces the rainbow colors in thin soap bubbles, or on a

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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 17, 2013 - 1 min read

I have somehow created nanopeople. Their heads are made of laser material and their bodies are made of silicon, which means there’s a remote chance that some of them could be lasers. They’re each so small (300nm high) that a normal bacterium would appear to them like a

Tag: microscopy

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