ucsd - AI Weirdness (Page 9)

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By Janelle Shane On August 15, 2013 - 1 min read

Tiny nanostructures. If you stacked a thousand of the largest one on top of each other, they would just about equal the thickness of a single sheet of paper. And then you should tell me how you managed to do it - maybe we could write a paper together. These

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

A speck of dust, viewed under the electron microscope. Looks a bit to me like a pirouetting bison. The dust is definitely microscopic - about 40 of these would fit inside your average skin cell. It’s sitting on the metal holder we use for mounting our samples - all

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By Janelle Shane On August 12, 2013 - 1 min read

Could this be the creature who’s been clambering all over my sample, raking scratches into my designs, cackling all the while? I sometimes wonder. … Or maybe it’s actually a speck of dust, as usual. This one’s large for a dust particle, but still invisible to the human

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By Janelle Shane On August 11, 2013 - 1 min read

These canyonlands, viewed under an electron microscope, are about a billion times smaller than the real thing - it’s strange how features repeat themselves on such vastly different scales. In this picture, the landscape is made of semiconductor laser material, with the features etched away from a smooth plain

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

The Lonely Mountain, home to nanodragons. The surface of this sample is coated with a rough, mountainous substance - likely created when the top layer of my sample (a photoresist) didn’t hold up well to a reactive plasma that I was shooting at the sample. One bit of the

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

A bit of string appears to bend space. This phenomenon is called “charging”, and can cause strange effects in scanning electron beam microscope images. What’s going on? To make a scanning electron microscope image, we literally scan a beam of electrons across our sample and detect the electrons that

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

Extreme close-up of a single speck of dust. It turns out that dust comes in all shapes and sizes, and this cloud-shaped piece is a rarity - I’ve also found mountains and sails and lumpy monsters. None of which are supposed to be there… but when I take my

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

A dream landscape, formed naturally by defects in a thin polymer film. This phenomenon is called Newton’s Rings, and is the same sort of thin-film effect that makes soap bubbles iridescent.

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By Janelle Shane On July 24, 2013 - 1 min read

Extreme close-ups: Tape at 272x, using an electron microscope This particular kind of tape has a kind of black cratered texture, and you can just barely see the holes when you hold a piece of the tape in your hands. In fact, the holes are right around the width of

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By Janelle Shane On July 23, 2013 - 1 min read

Bashful dust particle, viewed under an electron microscope Since our electron microscope isn’t inside the cleanroom, it’s hard to avoid the occasional visiting particle of dust. They appear randomly, like small beings exploring immense and weird landscapes. This one’s microscopic, and stands on a well-scratched metal surface.

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