nanoscale views

Writing (or perhaps I should say "creating", for the benefit of UK/Canada/Australia/NZ grammarians) good exams is not a trivial ta...

You may have heard about an electronic device called a memristor , a term originally coined by Leon Chua back in 1971, and billed as the ...

It's been an extremely busy time of the semester, and there appears to be no end in sight.  There will be more physics posts soon, but i...

I was shocked and saddened to learn of the death of Paul Barbara , a tremendous physical chemist and National Academy of Sciences member at...

Here are two extremely interesting videos related to physics topics.  Both combine two things I enjoy in life:  physics and coffee.  Here is...

I don't talk too much on here about the university service stuff that I do - frankly, much of it wouldn't be very interesting to mos...

The symposium in honor of Doug Osheroff was great fun. It was great to see old friends again, to hear some stories that I didn't know, ...

I am currently visiting Stanford for my thesis advisor's big birthday bash/retirement festivities. It's really great to see so many...

Today I was fortunate to host my department's weekly colloquium, with Prof. Wilson Ho from UC Irvine as the speaker.  He gave a great ta...

In honor of the 25th anniversary of the discovery of C 60 at Rice, the university is holding a symposium to celebrate.  In addition to the...

The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for graphene.  Congratulations to them!  Graphene, ...

One last post before the Nobel in physics is announced tomorrow.... As many people in the academic blogosphere have reported, there are some...

In the last couple of weeks, Sean Carroll has made two separate posts ( here and here ) on his widely read Cosmic Variance blog at Discover...

At long last, the National Research Council has finally released their rankings of graduate programs , the first such ranking since 1993. T...

My student (with theorist collaborators) had a paper published online in Nature Nanotechnology yesterday, and this gives me an excuse to ta...

Nothing as interesting as this happens around here (at least, not to my knowledge), and I'm kind of glad.  xkcd has once again done ...

There has been a good deal of talk lately about gravity. We're all taught early on in our science education about the remarkable insigh...

I had noticed (and it was also pointed out by a colleague) the essentially simultaneous publication of this paper and this paper (which ap...

In Saturday's Wall Street Journal, there was an article by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow clearly designed as a naked promotion...

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education , my Texas A&M colleagues up the road in College Station now get the privilege of being e...