AI Weirdness: the strange side of machine learning

Tag: bw

Total 61 Posts
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Our lab’s 3D printer auto-generates Gothic-style support scaffolding beneath the parts we design. Not only cool-looking, it serves an important purpose, since the 3D printer by its nature must build everything up from previous layers. The more elongated the shape, the weirder the scaffold.
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This is the nanolaser equivalent of being smacked in the face with a slab of corrugated roofing during a tornado.  There’s one step in making microscopic lasers where you have to peel away metal from much of the substrate, leaving behind pillar-shaped lasers surrounded by small metallic patches.  These
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Nano Street Fight Electron microscope image submitted by grad student Rajat Sharma of UCSD, who looked unsuccessfully with another grad student for a Brad Pitt-esque central character, before giving up and declaring the fight a total mess.  They were testing the etching conditions for making a series of tiny uniform
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Nanolasers with googly eyes!  Because grad students. These are microscopic lasers, shown in various stages of completion. The innermost layer, looking like a slim grey column, is the semiconductor core, which actually does the light-amplifying.  Next comes a layer of glass that coats the entire laser (the white puffy-looking laser)
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This is a nanotorch, which is an ultra-sensitive chemical detector, thanks to its ability to concentrate light.  In the intense light fields at the torch’s top, a normally-weak light-based chemical fingerprinting technique (Raman spectroscopy) becomes millions of times stronger.  More-sensitive Raman fingerprinting can allow us to detect trace contaminants
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Oops.  When we’re making nano-devices, chaos is usually bad.  I named this spot “The Barrens”. It’s supposed to be a single straight waveguide (basically, a pipe for light) stretching off into infinity.  Instead, this spot got scratched partway through the fabrication process, leaving behind a chaotic landscape that
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The cliffs of insanity?  Rising an awe-inspiring 1.5 microns above the wave-lashed sea (about 1/100 the thickness of a sheet of printer paper), these cliffs were formed when high-energy plasma ate away a layer of semiconductor.  All that was left behind was this island, protected by a glassy
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Like a tiny shiny mountain, this nanolaser and the area around it is coated in a layer of blobby silver.  The silver serves as a mirror that keeps the laser light bouncing around inside the laser’s light-amplifying interior, generating more and more copies of itself.  A tiny percentage of
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A nanoscale landscape, peopled with little pillars.  Each of these would fit easily inside a single cell.  They were created out of semiconductor (the same sort that can be made into lasers), when a high-energy plasma ate away everything that wasn’t protected. Each little pillar has a cap on
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