science - AI Weirdness (Page 6)

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By Janelle Shane On December 02, 2013 - 1 min read

This one looked to me like a line of people, standing at attention. It’s actually an edge-on view of a comb-like grating structure, seen here as it passes between two rectangular alignment markers. The people-like shape is due to the weird way the plasma etcher ate away the semiconductor,

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

Frostlike patterns emerge when acetone partially dissolves a plasticy layer of old photoresist. This is the same sample as in my previous post [http://tmblr.co/ZP7VLs_nDmsM], which used to be covered in jagged black mountains made of plasma-damaged photoresist. Now the mountains are mostly dissolved away, except for

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By Janelle Shane On November 18, 2013 - 1 min read

This image is from a test of our plasma etcher, and shows a white plain of semiconductor laser material etched partially away by plasma. In the background is the black remains of photoresist that was protecting other areas of semiconductor from being etched - it did the job, but took

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

A strange miniature landscape, none of which is supposed to be there. It’s quite small indeed - the pinnacles are each less than 1 micrometer tall, which means you’d need to stack a thousand of them on top of each other to equal one millimeter. This landscape is

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

Standing at the edge of the world. At microscopic scales, even a clean break isn’t very clean - this electron microscope picture is of the edge of a piece of glass, on which I had fabricated a long wall of semiconductor (the long columned wall you see at the

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

There are no dyes or pigments in this microscope image - it’s a thin clear film on a blank mirrorlike surface, and all the colors come from the interference of light waves. It’s the same effect that produces the rainbow colors in thin soap bubbles, or on a

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By Janelle Shane On October 31, 2013 - 1 min read

A ghost? This is a speck of dust sitting on a metal surface, seen close to the edge of a piece of tape - the tape is the weird lumpy surface looming over the whole scene. The ghostly figure (it looks to me a bit like a panda) may be

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By Janelle Shane On October 28, 2013 - 1 min read

Another eerie example of nanoscale terrain echoing macroscale terrain - the cliff in this image is only about 1/200 the thickness of a typical human hair. It’s been weathered away not by wind and rain, but by a blast of high-energy plasma. The thick black mountainous layer is

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

The broken edge of a piece of semiconductor laser material, viewed at 2,402x under an electron microscope. At this magnification, it’s clear that the edge isn’t cleanly broken at all, but has all sorts of furrows and ripples, all invisible to the naked eye, making it look

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By Janelle Shane On October 17, 2013 - 2 min read

Even when working in the cleanroom, a little dust is hard to avoid. This is a gallery of electron microscope pictures of dust specks I’ve encountered while making nanoscale devices in the UCSD Nano3 cleanrooms. Dust is made of a variety of materials - dead skin cells, tiny bits

Tag: science

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