nanoscale views

First, I have a guest post on the Houston Chronicle's science blog today.  Thanks for the opportunity, Eric. Second, here is a great ...

One of the most appealing aspects of a career in academic science and engineering is the freedom to choose your area of research. This free...

There was an interesting article earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal, on mental health concerns in college students. It's no ...

One remarkable aspect of Nature is the recurrence of certain mathematically interesting motifs in different contexts.  When we see a certain...

The answer is going to be, to quote the Magic 8-Ball , "Ask again later." Sounds like the folks at CERN are on track to make a mo...

My colleague in Rice's history department, Cyrus Mody , has a new book out called Instrumental Community , about the invention and sprea...

My colleagues at Texas A&M University must be so happy to hear that in these troubled economic times, their university is rumored to be ...

A (revised) particularly excellent review article was posted on the arxiv the other day, about metal nanostructures as antennas for light ....

There's an article (subscription only, unfortunately) out that has gotten some attention , discussing whether artificial molecular mach...

The OPERA collaboration, or at least a large subset of it, has a revised preprint out (and apparently submitted somewhere), with more data ...

Yesterday I went to an interesting talk here by Eric Toone , deputy director of ARPA-E , what is supposed to be the blue-sky high-risk/high-...

Today we hosted Phil Plait for our annual Rorschach Lecture (see here ), a series in honor of Bud Rorschach dedicated to public outreach an...

As pointed out by Peter Woit , Steve Hsu recently posted a link to an interview with (the late) Sidney Coleman, generally viewed as one of...

Hat tip to Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer , for linking to this video from The Daily Show.  My apologies to non-US readers who won't be ...

As I have done in past years, I'm revising a past post of mine about the faculty search process. My thoughts on this really haven'...

This week's issue of Nature includes an interesting editorial emphasizing how crucial it is that scientists and engineers learn how to ...

I'm buried under a couple of pieces of work right now, but I did want to share a couple of fun science videos. Here is a great example ...

According to this , Google stock may take a hit because their revenues only grew year-over-year by 30% this past quarter. Specifically, ana...

I was going to do a post about quasicrystals and this year's chemistry Nobel , but Don Monroe has done such a good job in his Phys Rev ...

A post on quasicrystals will be coming eventually.... Suppose you're an extremely successful tech company, and you want to make a real,...