nanoscale views

It's not nano-related, but I found this video fascinating.  Clearly technology has gotten to the point where Hollywood can fake just ab...

I was looking at this week's Phys Rev Letters, and I saw this paper being highlighted as an editor's suggestion.  Now, I don't ...

What distinguishes one phase of matter from another?  A physicist would probably say that different phases possess different symmetries.  Mo...

Shocking news out of Alabama yesterday, where three faculty members (incl. the chair) of the biology department at UA Huntsville were shot,...

Superconducting quantum interference devices, or SQUID s, are fascinating gadgets.  Take a superconducting loop with two weak links (e.g., t...

When it first began, I was impressed with the arxivblog .  The anonymous authors did a good and remarkably prompt job of surfing the preprin...

US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu is going to be on "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" this coming Saturday, presumably doing their...

One aspect of experimental science that never shows up on TV procedurals (NCIS, CSI) is the "lab mystery" - the simple procedure t...

The Female Science Professor is doing a great series of posts about interviewing for faculty jobs.  See here , here , and here , with two mo...

Tonight in the State of the Union address, President Obama will supposedly propose a freeze on discretionary federal spending for the next t...

Looking at the arxiv this evening, I came across this paper , in which the authors demonstrate a silicon-based single-electron transistor th...

Motivated in part by this recent paper and ensuing conversation here , I thought it might be useful to say a few words about inelastic elec...

Gee, Gov. Perry, did you ever think that one reason Texas has a hard time recruiting and retaining highly educated workers and high tech com...

I was quite surprised to see this articl e in Science, talking about the much debated possible merger between Rice and Baylor College of Me...

I've been spending this week at the International Conference on Molecular Electronics , and it's been very interesting.  Topics have...

Happy New Year to my readers.  Posts will pick up again in 2010.  In the mean time, you might be amused by a couple of science-y gifts I got...

Some recent arxiv articles that I really should find the time to read in depth: arxiv:0809.3474 - Affleck, Quantum impurity problems in c...

The last kind of electrical noise I wanted to discuss is called 1/ f or "flicker" noise, and it's something of a special case...

I read this column on the back page of this month's APS News, and I think it hits a lot of the right notes, until this paragraph: Man...

While Johnson-Nyquist noise is an equilibrium phenomenon, shot noise is a nonequilibrium effect, only present when there is a net current b...