nanoscale views

Lately there has been a big kerfluffle (technical term of art, there) in the blog-o-sphere about what the high energy physics experimentalis...

Before I go to teach class this morning, I wanted to link to this great post by ZapperZ about the grad student/research adviser relationshi...

Orientation week has kept me very busy - hence the paucity of posts.  I did see something intriguing on the arxiv recently (several things, ...

I have a question, and I'm hoping one of my reader experts might be able to answer it for me.  Let me set the stage.  One reason 3d topo...

Went for the cryptic headline.  I'm off for a Department of Energy Basic Energy Sciences Condensed Matter Experiment principal investig...

Over the last couple of weeks, new forms of spam comments have been appearing on blogger. One type takes a sentence or two from the post it...

Every year at Rice in early August, the Rice Quantum Institute (old website) (shorthand: people who care about interdisciplinary science ...

At the heart of condensed matter physics are two key concepts: the emergence of rich phenomena (including spontaneously occurring order - s...

Recently, in the course of other writing I've been doing, I again came to the topic of what are called Einstein A and B coefficients, an...

This is mostly for my American readers - be forewarned. I wrote last year about a plan put forward by Rick O'Donnell, a controversial...

As ZZ has pointed out , Nature is running a feature article on the history of high temperature superconductivity over the last 25 years. I...

I finally bit the bullet and updated the look of the blog.  I'm still keeping it ad-free, though.

I have a nagging feeling that google+ could somehow be used to significantly increase readership of my blog, if only I was appropriately sa...

Over the last decade, there has been a great deal of exciting work in making electronically interesting systems at atomically sharp interfac...

I couldn't help but notice that one of my favorite producers of animated films, Aardman Animation , is coming out with a new movie (trai...

Regarding the story mentioned here , Nature has published both a provocative and interesting article by Eugenie Reich about the larger issu...

This past weekend, I caught a snippet of a rebroadcast of this NPR story about Jane McGonigal and the thesis of her recent book. In short...

Time and again, a major impediment to research progress in condensed matter physics, electrical engineering, materials science, and physical...

Five years ago, there was a controversy in the pages of Nature regarding this paper from 1993, the first to claim atomic-resolution chemica...

Summer blogging has been and will continue to be light, as I try to get some professional writing done. In the meantime, though, I have to ...