nanoscale views

I was just able to help out my postdoc by pulling an old Bell Labs notebook from 11.5 years ago off my bookshelf and showing him a schematic...

Statistical mechanics, the physics of many-particle systems, is a profound intellectual achievement.  A statistical approach to systems with...

Science Magazine has named the work of a team at UCSB directed by Andrew Cleland and John Martinis as their scientific breakthrough of t...

As discussed in my previous post , temperature may be associated with how energy is distributed among microscopic degrees of freedom (like t...

In preparation for a post about a new paper from my group, I realized that it will be easier to explain why the result is cool if I first w...

Hat tip to David Bacon for highlighting this.  Republican whip Eric Cantor has apparently decided that the best way to start cutting gover...

I was again thinking about why it can be difficult to explain some solid-state physics ideas to the lay public, and I think part of the prob...

On the anomalous combustion of oleic and linoleic acid mixtures J. Maccabeus et al ., Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Judea Olive-derived oil...

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...