science - AI Weirdness (Page 10)

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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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By Janelle Shane On July 24, 2013 - 1 min read

Extreme close-ups: Tape at 272x, using an electron microscope This particular kind of tape has a kind of black cratered texture, and you can just barely see the holes when you hold a piece of the tape in your hands. In fact, the holes are right around the width of

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By Janelle Shane On July 23, 2013 - 1 min read

Bashful dust particle, viewed under an electron microscope Since our electron microscope isn’t inside the cleanroom, it’s hard to avoid the occasional visiting particle of dust. They appear randomly, like small beings exploring immense and weird landscapes. This one’s microscopic, and stands on a well-scratched metal surface.

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

The “light” at the bottom of this glowing crater is all electrons. What you’re seeing here is a thin layer of glass with a hole chipped in it. At the bottom of the hole, just out of the field of view, is a layer of silicon. In the electron

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By Janelle Shane On July 19, 2013 - 1 min read

A particle of dust, viewed at around 19,000x in an electron microscope. It’s sitting on a little pedestal that it made itself out of my semiconductor laser material - no, I didn’t give it permission. The dust particle selflessly protected that patch of semiconductor from the harsh

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

Microscopic hills along a glass fracture Here, the edge of one of my samples was chipped, and the glass had flaked off in a ridged pattern. The ridges continued right down to the border of the chipped area, where they became microscopic. These hills are so small that you could

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

An upside-down mountain, formed from dust. The whole thing is about the size of a single bacterium. The mountain is, as usual, not supposed to be there - it’s a piece of dust that landed on my sample. Despite doing all my processing work in the cleanroom, it’s

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

Extreme close-up of tape in a scanning electron microscope. It’s conductive carbon tape, which we use for mounting stuff in the electron microscope, and it’s usually covered in strange craters and textures - I don’t know what purpose those serve. Does make it look like some kind

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