nanoscale views

The Bad Astronomer periodically makes posts that show just how cool some astro phenomenon or astro observational capability can be. In keep...

No, I'm not talking about Peter Woit's website or Wolfgang Pauli .  Instead, I mean this article , which shows that Allstate Insura...

I'm starting to know how Phil Plait must feel every time he has to write yet another article about how Betelgeuse is not about to expl...

Here are a number of links that may be of interest: Back in December, Steven Blau at Physics Today wrote an interesting blog post about th...

Having read something about this online, I had to see for myself.  Take a look at this paper .  One of the 2008 Nobel laureates for medicine...

Yesterday I received a very nice and welcome email from a faculty member who had been one of my best classroom instructors in graduate schoo...

While I don't do any research on the subject myself, over the last few years I've become more interested in the origins of friction,...

Happy new year! I want to write a little about what physicists call spin-orbit interactions. It turns out that there is a deep connection ...

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...