ucsd - AI Weirdness (Page 7)

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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.

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By Janelle Shane On September 06, 2013 - 1 min read

Three views of the same flasks of fluorescent rhodamine dye. At the far right is a picture of how the flasks look under regular room lights. In the middle, the scene is illuminated by a UV-emitting flashlight (otherwise known as a blacklight). Under this strong, high-energy illumination, the fluorescence from

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By Janelle Shane On September 04, 2013 - 1 min read

A high-resolution zoomed view of one of my samples - all these weird natural-looking pillars means that there was some serious micromasking going on. Micromasking is what happens when I’m trying to etch away a material by bombarding it with high-energy plasma, and little particles of dust or oil

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By Janelle Shane On September 01, 2013 - 1 min read

A nano-landscape, made of dark strips of laser-melted areas, interspersed with brighter less-damaged regions. I’m not sure what the mountain is made of - maybe even the melted remains of a dust speck. You’d have to stack a thousand of the mountains on top of each other to

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