science art - AI Weirdness (Page 5)

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

Tiny nanostructures. If you stacked a thousand of the largest one on top of each other, they would just about equal the thickness of a single sheet of paper. And then you should tell me how you managed to do it - maybe we could write a paper together. These

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

A speck of dust, viewed under the electron microscope. Looks a bit to me like a pirouetting bison. The dust is definitely microscopic - about 40 of these would fit inside your average skin cell. It’s sitting on the metal holder we use for mounting our samples - all

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

Could this be the creature who’s been clambering all over my sample, raking scratches into my designs, cackling all the while? I sometimes wonder. … Or maybe it’s actually a speck of dust, as usual. This one’s large for a dust particle, but still invisible to the human

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By Janelle Shane On August 11, 2013 - 1 min read

These canyonlands, viewed under an electron microscope, are about a billion times smaller than the real thing - it’s strange how features repeat themselves on such vastly different scales. In this picture, the landscape is made of semiconductor laser material, with the features etched away from a smooth plain

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

The Lonely Mountain, home to nanodragons. The surface of this sample is coated with a rough, mountainous substance - likely created when the top layer of my sample (a photoresist) didn’t hold up well to a reactive plasma that I was shooting at the sample. One bit of the

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By Janelle Shane On August 09, 2013 - 1 min read

Soap bubble-like rainbow colors means that this sample has a thin film of something on it, just like a soap bubble or oily puddle. The colors change quickly, so there’s probably a ton of variation in the thickness of the coating - in fact, the rainbow stripes are packed

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By Janelle Shane On August 08, 2013 - 1 min read

A bit of string appears to bend space. This phenomenon is called “charging”, and can cause strange effects in scanning electron beam microscope images. What’s going on? To make a scanning electron microscope image, we literally scan a beam of electrons across our sample and detect the electrons that

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

Extreme close-up of a single speck of dust. It turns out that dust comes in all shapes and sizes, and this cloud-shaped piece is a rarity - I’ve also found mountains and sails and lumpy monsters. None of which are supposed to be there… but when I take my

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By Janelle Shane On August 05, 2013 - 1 min read

A dream landscape, formed naturally by defects in a thin polymer film. This phenomenon is called Newton’s Rings, and is the same sort of thin-film effect that makes soap bubbles iridescent.

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