science - AI Weirdness (Page 3)

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By Janelle Shane On June 06, 2014 - 1 min read

Pretty rainbow colors brought to you by the wave nature of light. The phenomenon that made these wild colors out of a thin film of photoresist on silicon is the same phenomenon that’s behind the rainbow colors of soap bubbles and oily puddles. It’s also a more chaotic

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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 May 17, 2014 - 1 min read

A Devil’s Tower-like monument rises above a sea of bubbles. It’s just another day in the life of a nanolaser researcher. The tower is a microscopic laser in the process of being built - here, it’s shown after it was carved out of a flat sheet of

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By Janelle Shane On May 15, 2014 - 1 min read

The one on the left is a nanolaser, carved by high-energy plasma and strong acid, and invisible to the naked eye. The one on the right is a hoodoo, carved by wind and rain, and is approximately 20 million times larger. And about 60 million times older. The reason they

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By Janelle Shane On May 11, 2014 - 1 min read

It looks like it could be an image of desert badlands - except for that strangely translucent wall. In fact, this scene is much, much smaller. An ant could step over the wall without ever noticing its existence. This image was taken through an electron microscope, of a microscopic landscape

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By Janelle Shane On May 10, 2014 - 1 min read

Resembling arrays of flaming islands, these formations are actually microscopic, etched out of semiconductor. This semiconductor material is what we use to make microscopic lasers - we start with a vast, featureless sheet of semiconductor and cover certain areas with a protective layer of glassy photoresist. Then we blast the

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By Janelle Shane On May 09, 2014 - 1 min read

It resembles a mushroom cloud, but in fact, it’s one of our microscopic nanolasers, imaged under an electron microscope. These lasers are among the smallest in the world, so small you could fit a billion of them on an iPhone home button, small enough to one day fit easily

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By Janelle Shane On May 08, 2014 - 1 min read

Strange formations caused when high-energy plasma from a reactive ion etcher bombards semiconductor materials. We use the reactive ion etcher to carve out microscopic optical devices, like lasers and filters. Here, there’s no particular device that we were trying to make - we were just testing to see if

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By Janelle Shane On May 02, 2014 - 1 min read

The cliffs of fluffiness! Lashed by impossibly pointy nano-waves. The fluffy stuff at the top is actually photoresist, a glassy substance that we use to protect semiconductor from plasma bombardment when we’re doing our etching. Here, the photoresist protected the semiconductor below it from being etched away, making the

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By Janelle Shane On April 26, 2014 - 1 min read

The color makeup of a fluorescent light, imaged through a spectrometer made of folded paper and a chunk of DVD. You can print and fold your own for free following the instructions here [http://publiclab.org/wiki/foldable-spec] (they also have a kit [http://store.publiclab.org/products/foldable-mini-spectrometer] , which

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