science - AI Weirdness

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By Janelle Shane On August 26, 2015 - 1 min read

ucresearch [http://ucresearch.tumblr.com/post/127567457311]: How Dust Is Holding Science Back > To most of us dust is just something we clean off our furniture, but to scientists dust can cause big problems in the lab. Computer chips are put together and tested in what are called clean

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By Janelle Shane On July 26, 2015 - 1 min read

Our lab’s 3D printer auto-generates Gothic-style support scaffolding beneath the parts we design. Not only cool-looking, it serves an important purpose, since the 3D printer by its nature must build everything up from previous layers. The more elongated the shape, the weirder the scaffold.

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By Janelle Shane On July 16, 2015 - 1 min read

Free snacks with purchase of new equipment: it’s a thing in optics research labs. Thorlabs started including boxes of “Lab Snacks” whenever there was extra room in a flat-rate shipment. Optics researchers are of course completely non-susceptible to inducements of this sort. Yet now, coincidentally, Newport Optics is including

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By Janelle Shane On July 03, 2015 - 1 min read

Petri dish art by Xiao Hui Lau [http://xiaohuilau.com/2015/07/a-yeasty-4th-of-july/] Hui (pronounced “Hway”) explains: > I present you with possibly one of the more complicated pieces I’ve done so far. This is a special kind of agar (CHROMagar) plate featuring yeast! The different colors on this

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By Janelle Shane On June 26, 2015 - 2 min read

This seemed like a good day to post some rainbow laser modes! Light in a circular cavity makes a variety of standing wave patterns, some of which look like flowers, wagon wheels, or even tie-fighter spaceships. These images are from my simulations of the light in the cavities of nanolasers

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By Janelle Shane On June 22, 2015 - 1 min read

Our new 3D lab printer makes strange Gothic support scaffolding.

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By Janelle Shane On June 18, 2015 - 1 min read

In the grand science geek tradition, proposal success is often celebrated by the ritual baking of themed cupcakes. NASA funded my phase 1 proposal to build holographic laser tweezers for the International Space Station! Holographic laser tweezers are about as cool as they sound - beams of laser light that

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By Janelle Shane On April 24, 2015 - 1 min read

Top: An electron microscope photo of long, straight waveguides (left) interrupted by an accidental scratch during fabrication, that turned the orderly stripes into naturalistic chaos. Each structure is about 0.5 microns high, or less than 1/200 the thickness of a typical human hair. Bottom: A photo on quite

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By Janelle Shane On February 02, 2015 - 1 min read

This is the nanolaser equivalent of being smacked in the face with a slab of corrugated roofing during a tornado. There’s one step in making microscopic lasers where you have to peel away metal from much of the substrate, leaving behind pillar-shaped lasers surrounded by small metallic patches. These

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By Janelle Shane On November 25, 2014 - 1 min read

On the right: a photonic nanostructure, used in researching new light-based ways to make computers communicate faster. On the left: a single human hair (oops). Fortunately, according to Dr. Felipe Vallini of UCSD (who made and imaged this structure): “A hair hit my device, but he is still fine!”

Tag: science

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