science - AI Weirdness (Page 5)

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

This is what an ordinary coffee shop looks like through diffraction glasses, which act like prisms to separate white light into a rainbow of colors. In this shot, you can see that not all white sources are alike - a few of them produce a continuous rainbow of colors, while

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

A rare view of the entire cross-section of one of my samples, which seems to loom like a massive iceberg over choppy seas. This sample is a thin layer of semiconductor (a material we use for making lasers, among other things), bonded to a much thicker chunk of glass. The

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By Janelle Shane On February 01, 2014 - 1 min read

Fracture patterns at the edge of a broken wafer (broken on purpose, for once). The lighter top layer is silicon, and the darker bottom layer is glass. The glass looks darker than the silicon because it’s a better electrical insulator - the electron beam microscope makes an image by

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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 January 16, 2014 - 1 min read

The crazy-huge mountains of the nanoworld! The strange waves and scallops are what is left of the protective mask I used to shield the semiconductor material below from a high-energy etching plasma. The mask held up to the plasma, although it was probably damaged a bit - and then I

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By Janelle Shane On January 14, 2014 - 1 min read

A mini-monument, made of semiconductor laser material. It looks to me a bit like Devil’s Tower. It’s much, much smaller, though. Scaling this little nano-tower (600nm high) to the height of Devil’s Tower (386m high) would be like scaling up an average-sized human (~1.7m) to about

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

Like little colorful jewels, these microscopic spots of color are probably the remnants of a thin coating that once covered this sample. The spots get their color not from the usual pigments or dyes that color things like flower petals and paint, but from another phenomenon, called structural color, which

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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 10, 2013 - 1 min read

Coastline of the land of monuments… tiny monuments. Each of them would fit easily inside a single human cell. They’re formed out of semiconductor, and are the result of what we call micromasking: tiny bits of debris landed on the semiconductor before the etching step, and protected the semiconductor

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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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