nanoscale views

I've mentioned ionic liquid gating a couple of times ( here , here ) before.  Ionic liquids are basically organic salts (molecular anion...

Now that a couple of papers are in and the never-ending list of tasks is getting shorter, hopefully blogging will pick back up. Here are a...

This video is great at pointing out much of what is wrong with high school physics education in the US.  However, I find the implication th...

Over the last couple of months I've been reflecting about some aspects of being an academic physicist, particularly what skills are impo...

Just a quick note that I'm finally done w/ my NSF proposal, and I will be back to blogging about science soon.  One quick link for you a...

This paper posted to the arxiv the other day provides a very readable, practical discussion of error analysis and curve fitting.  While I h...

Pardon the use of the blog for advertising, but it can only help broaden the reach of the ad: The Department of Physics and Astronomy...

Several links to bide time while I try to write to many things. Congratulations, of course, to this year's Nobel winners in physics! ...

Eight years ago, Moses Chan of Penn State made big news by publishing experimental evidence that appeared to be consistent with supersolid...

Still working on proposals, so this will be brief.  However, as mentioned in my previous post, I did want to add in some topics/open questio...

A little over six years ago (!), I wrote this post , where I listed a whole series of topics that were hot/exciting/controversial at the tim...

A paper appeared on the arxiv recently (published in Advanced Materials ) from a group in Leipzig reporting magnetic measurements that the ...

My local public radio station has been repeatedly promoting the TED Radio Hour , which involves (to paraphrase the promo) people having 18 m...

The internet has been buzzing about the rumored cheating scandal at Harvard , where more than half of the students in an introductory polit...

A brief post for a busy time:  For various reasons, I'm interested in lab safety training of grad students (and postdocs and undergrads)...

The Wall Street Journal ran this article yesterday, which basically talks about how some journals try to manipulate their impact factors by...

A colleague and I were talking this morning about what knowledge depth is desirable in referees.  A reviewer who does not know an area in de...

Today Congressman Todd Akin from Missouri, also the Republican nominee for the US Senate seat currently held by Sen. Claire McCaskill, said...

For the third year in a row, I'm going to be teaching Rice's honors intro mechanics course (PHYS 111).  I use the outstanding but ma...

It was disheartening to hear of another sad loss in the community of condensed matter physics, with the passing of Zlatko Tesanovic. I ha...