- The NY Times posted this great video about using patterned hydrophobic/hydrophilic surfaces to get bouncing water droplets to spin. Science has their own video, and the paper itself is here.
- Back in January Scientific American had this post regarding graduate student mental health. This is a very serious, complex issue, thankfully receiving increased attention.
- The new Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument has had "first light."
- Later this week the Event Horizon Telescope will be releasing its first images of the supermassive black hole at the galactic center.
- SpaceX is getting ready to launch a Falcon Heavy carrying a big communications satellite. The landing for these things is pretty science-fiction-like!
A blog about condensed matter and nanoscale physics. Why should high energy and astro folks have all the fun?
Monday, April 08, 2019
Brief items
A few brief items as I get ready to write some more about several issues:
You may have missed the sad passing of David Thouless, as it wasn’t included in your items: https://www.trinhall.cam.ac.uk/news/professor-david-thouless-1934-2019/
ReplyDeleteIndeed, I found out about David Thouless a few hours after I made the post. Thanks for pointing this out. I was fortunate enough to be introduced to him at an APS meeting while I was a postdoc, and to have a chance to talk with him briefly about some mesoscopic physics work.
ReplyDeleteToday marks another big step for humanity. To quote Seth Fletcher, from Scientific American: "It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the strangeness of nature, and the remarkable fact that these sentient, tool-using bipeds on a small world in a backwater solar system somehow managed to turn their planet into a telescope and take a picture of an exit chute from the universe."
ReplyDelete