Brief items

Here are some items of interest:

• An attempt to lay out a vision for research in the US beyond Science: The Endless Frontier.  The evolving roles of the national academies are interesting, though I found the description of the future of research universities to be rather vague - I'm not sure growing universities to the size of Arizona State is the best way to provide high quality access to knowledge for a large population.  It still feels to me like an eventual successful endpoint for online education could be natural language individualized tutoring ("Alexa, teach me multivariable calculus."), but we are still a long way from there.
• Atomic-resolution movies of chemistry are still cool.
• Dan Ralph at Cornell has done a nice service to the community by making his lecture notes available on the arxiv.  The intent is for these to serve as a supplement to a solid state course such as one out of Ashcroft and Mermin, bringing students up to date about Berry curvature and topology at a similar level to that famous text.
• This preprint tries to understand an extremely early color photography process developed by Becquerel (the photovoltaic one, who was the father of the radioactivity Becquerel).  It turns out that there are systematic changes in reflectivity spectra of the exposed Ag/AgCl films depending on the incident wavelength.  Why the reflectivity changes that way remains a mystery to me after reading this.
• On a related note, this led me to this PNAS paper about the role of plasmons in the daguerreotype process.  Voila, nanophotonics in the 19th century.
• This preprint (now out in Nature Nano) demonstrates incredibly sensitive measurements of torques on very rapidly rotating dielectric nanoparticles.  This could be used to see vacuum rotational friction.
• The inventors of chemically amplified photoresists have been awarded the Charles Stark Draper prize.  Without that research, you probably would not have the computing device sitting in front of you....