nanoscale views

Helium consumption is still a problem.  A real problem .

This is not physics, but it is interesting.  According to fivethirtyeight.com (a blog run by Nate Silver that specializes in statistical an...

A reader emailed me and asked if I had done a posting about excitons.  Looking back, I see that I haven't, so here is an attempt to rect...

I'm traveling this week, so blogging is thin. I did want to point out an interesting review article from the arviv: arxiv:1006.3736 , ...

This post is a bit late, but real life has been busy recently. The Kavli Foundation recently announced their 2010 Kavli Prize for Nanoscie...

The idea of using mechanical resonators as mass sensors is an old one, and one that may be explained to a first-year physics undergrad. The...

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 ...