nanoscale views

This is a topic that comes up at many research universities, and I'd be curious for your opinions.  Some institutions formally allow res...

This past week I was fortunate enough to attend this workshop at Trinity College, Dublin , all about the physics of atomic- and molecular-...

In our most recent paper , we found that we could dope a particularly interesting material, vanadium dioxide, with atomic hydrogen, via ...

I just received the following email: Dear Pro. , Considering your research in related areas, we cordially invite you to submit ...

Edward Purcell was one of the great physicists of the 20th century.  He won the Nobel Prize in physics for his (independent) discovery of ...

Thanks to ZapperZ for bringing this to my attention. This paper is about to appear in Phys Rev Letters, and argues that the Lorentz forc...

When we teach about thermal physics at the macroscopic scale, we talk in terms of the thermal conductivity, k .  For the 1d problem of a ho...

A long while ago, I brought up the topic of persistent currents in normal metal rings .  Please click the link to get the context.  The poi...

This article in the NY Times is rather provocative in several ways. First, it raises the question of whether there is a dramatic rise tak...

This post is a mini-summary of a Perspectives piece I wrote for ACS Nano.  One conceptually simple way to measure the electronic properties...

Two recurring complaints about bibliographies and citations for papers and proposals: Most people really like DOI , a system meant to assure...

One of the various hats I wear right now is chair of Rice's university committee on research, and one topic that has come up lately (in ...

Hello, Dr. Tyson. First, let me say that I'm a huge fan. You do the scientific community a tremendous service by being such an approac...

My apologies to my readers for low blogging rate recently. Multiple papers, proposals, teaching, travel, etc. have all contributed to this ...

Professors have many responsibilities - to their students and postdocs, to their departments and colleagues, to their university, to the sci...

Two items, oddly about parapsychology (as a means to raise points about science and the public).  First, this article from The Guardian las...

Some interesting and thought-provoking things have come up in the last week or so. For instance, here is an article from the IEEE that dis...

I am out on a brief break, but I wold be remiss if I didn't point out this exciting result. The investigators have managed to make a l...

This is for everyone out there who submits to proposals to the Division of Materials Research , and more broadly, to the National Science Fo...

Not too much to report from the final day of the March Meeting. Lots of good conversations with colleagues, though I never did get a chance...