science - AI Weirdness (Page 7)

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By Janelle Shane On October 14, 2013 - 1 min read

I found an area of strange mesa-like structures on one of my samples - near this spot, the sample broke, scattering tiny fragments of glass and laser material across that part of the sample’s surface. After I used high-energy plasma to etch most of the laser material away, the

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

Nanosouffle? This piece of dust appears to have partially deflated. I’m not sure if it really did crumple, or if it’s just a trick of the angle. The light-colored platform it’s sitting on is all semiconductor laser material, that the dust protected from the high-energy plasma that

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

Closeup of artificial opal, formed on fragments of microscope slides by drying little plastic beads. Everywhere that the beads happened to assemble themselves into regular arrays as they dried, you get iridescent rainbow colors - the “fire” of opal. The rainbow iridescence comes from the interference of light waves as

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

This is a bit of clear rubbery silicone with a gold-coated hologram on the top. The patterns are little microchannels where liquid can flow across the surface of the silicone; the larger round areas are where hollow needles can be poked in from the other side of the silicone to

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

More strange naturalistic formations in a sample where the plasma etching went really, really wrong. This was supposed to be flat, empty, and perfectly smooth. Actually, it still looks that way under anything but an electron microscope… an ant could step on this and not even notice. It’s plenty,

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By Janelle Shane On September 29, 2013 - 1 min read

A speck of dust sits on a pedestal - this is a smallish piece of dust, only about 1/100 the thickness of an average human hair. The dust made its own pedestal by protecting a small area from the high-energy plasma that I was using to etch away the

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

Nanoscale forces work in non-intuitive ways sometimes. This wall of semiconductor was plasma-etched so thin that the middle was etched entirely away, leaving the wall’s top floating eerily above void. It’s thin and lacy, and only touches the wall’s bottom in a few delicate places, yet it

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By Janelle Shane On September 14, 2013 - 1 min read

String! I definitely wasn’t expecting to see this - it startled me when I first came across it, partly because it was looping up dramatically into midair before it sagged, as I watched, under the glare of the microscope’s electron beam. It came to rest draped over one

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

Looking like architectural columns, these structures are more than two million times shorter than their life-sized counterparts. Put another way, they’re only knee-high to a bacterium - the only way we can see them is with a powerful electron microscope. We’re not making buildings with these structures, but

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

Here’s another example of what happens when dust lands on my sample just before the etching phase. The giant wing-like airy structure is the dust - due to the odd way nanoscale forces work, this fragile thing remains upright and intact even after the sample’s tilted and jostled.

Tag: science

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