nanoscale views

I've been meaning for some time to write a post about demagnetization cooling, a technique that is readily explained in an undergrad sta...

For the last few years I have been involved with Rice's ADVANCE program , a NSF-supported initiative designed particularly to increase ...

While modern communications tools are definitely improving, there is still no substitute for actually sitting down with collaborators at a t...

Craig Venter's company appears to have succeeded in creating a synthetic genome and getting it into an emptied-out (prokaryotic bacteri...

The charge-coupled device, or CCD, was the gadget behind part of this past year's Nobel prize in physics.  Far and away, the most commo...

The title of this post harkens back to a previous example of stellar corporate governance.  Today the CEO of BP made the statement that ...

Over the years, I've become convinced that there are lies, damned lies, and cost accounting .  What I mean by this is that "true co...

Perhaps a more economically savvy and inclined reader could comment, but is it fair to say that some fraction of the recent decline of the U...

In much of physics, LaTeX is the standard for typesetting scholarly work, including research papers and theses.  Traditionally, when working...

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, ...