nanoscale views

Some things I learned at my final Packard meeting: The density of stars in a globular cluster is just absurd - something like 10 4 -10 6 st...

I'm in Park City for my last annual meeting as a Packard Fellow. As I've said before, I can't speak highly enough of the Packar...

First, following up on my earlier post about the field effect .... I'd seen some of this before but had some really good conversations ...

According to a news article in Nature , there are now only four PhD scientists left at Bell Labs doing basic research. Four. Leaving aside...

I'm off to Japan for this week, primarily to speak here , and secondarily to guarantee that I'm a jetlagged wreck for the first week...

I think that we need to coin an official term, "cryptophysicist", to describe people who do physics research outside the mainstrea...

For anyone interested in the US presidential candidates' positions on science, I recommend this NPR piece from today's "All Th...

This article (thinks, Incoherent Ponderer , for pointing this out and your insightful post ) is really distressing. Prof. Plummer is a cla...

Three little items.... First, the Foundational Questions folks have announced their funding recipients . These grants, intended for fundam...

It's that time of year again, when we get a brief break from high-90s (F) heat and high humidity by having a tropical weather system blo...

I'm probably overdue for making a post introducing some physics topic for a nonspecialist audience, so here you go.... What is the field...

Now this is a modest proposal whose time has come. It's common that experimental physicists gradually (or not so gradually) accumulate...

Two new papers in Nano Letters caught my eye. Danilov et al ., " Nanoelectromechanical switch operating by tunneling of an entire C60 m...

I understand that the folks at CERN feel like it's important for people to be aware of the LHC and get excited about it - at this point,...

I could've predicted this. Given current energy concerns, it's not at all surprising that the various media are ready to give airti...

I'll be traveling (work + vacation), so blogging will be slow until July 15 or so. Before I go, I wanted to point out that the plot cont...

Recently I've had some conversations with a couple of people, including someone involved in journalism, about what makes a physics exper...

Thanks to Tom for having a link on his page to this . Too true! This is also brilliant. Good to have a laugh, despite the passing of Ge...

I wasn't going to even mention the idea of a Singularity , but then the IEEE made a point of dedicating an issue of their magazine to t...

My university is in the design phase on a new physics building. This is exciting - first, it's a rare opportunity to design new lab spa...