nanoscale views

There's an old quote from Isaac Asimov that is very true:  "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new ...

Last May, I participated in a very well run and informative workshop on nanotechnology for sensing purposes.  The workshop was run by the Na...

The US News rankings of US graduate programs are out again, and I've heard a fair bit of discussion about them.  My department, for exa...

Here is a scientific ethical dilemma that came up in conversation recently.  What do you do if you get a positive referee report, but it...

Three interesting pieces of physics (among many) from the arxiv this week: arxiv:1004.0546 - Mak et al ., Atomically thin MoS 2 :  A new ...

Blogging will be on hold for a few days, as I'm going to have an appendectomy very soon. Thank you, medical physicists, for developing ...

Four years ago, this paper caught my attention.  The authors had made a structure with superconducting NbTiN contacts on top of a CrO 2 f...

I am, of course, pleased that Nature Materials ran a news item about our recent paper .  However, they appear to have missed the point a b...

Back in February, 2007 , I mentioned that I thought that making and measuring nanostructures directly out of strongly correlated materials w...

The March Meeting is over, and overall it was good, as usual, and far too large, as usual.  Clearly the favorite topics this year were topol...

This was the title of an invited session yesterday at the APS meeting.  Ivan Schuller put together a very interesting collection of talks, ...

I'm at the APS March Meeting, and as it is every year, it's really too big.  I've largely been spending much of my time at sessi...

In the Wall Street Journal over this past weekend, Peter Berkowitz argues that peer review is a corrupt system with no objectivity and lit...

I know that this will appeal to a differentially small fraction of my readership, but as a native of Pittsburgh of a certain age I am compel...

I'm going to be doing some travel this week, and next week is the APS March Meeting in Portland, OR, so blog posts are likely to be thin...

Zapperz wrote an interesting post that links to an article in USA Today about whether Comedy Central (specifically The Daily Show and The...

A very big story in recent years in condensed matter physics is that of topological insulators, and it's a great tale of finding somethi...

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...