nanoscale views

Thanks to developments in surface science, surface chemistry, and nanoscience, we now understand far more about the microscopic origins of f...

I was saddened to read of the passing of Bob Richardson , who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1996 with his colleague Dave Lee and t...

This is one of those once-every-six-months self-promotion posts about a new paper from our group.  The result is sufficiently surprising, w...

It's been a busy week.  On Monday I gave a colloquium at Pomona College , and visited both there and Harvey Mudd .  It's great to se...

Some scientific claims are so outlandish that they do not pass the "laugh test".  That is, for these claims to be true it would re...

I had been meaning to write a blog post about this for some time, and the recent news article from the BBC and post by ZapperZ inspired me...

While they sound like something you might find in the Skymall catalog, whiskey stones have been touted as a way to cool drinks without the ...

Sorry about the blogging lull.  More to come soon. In the meantime, this is hilarious, distressing, and insightful in equal portions.  I ...

It's not my area, but I always take notice when part of the physics community is abuzz about a thought experiment that seems to expose...

Three of my colleagues and I are helping to organize a workshop at Rice University on May 20-22, 2013.  The goal of this ARO-sponsored works...

Thanks to a colleague, in addition to the controversy discussed here , I have been following closely the saga of science-fraud.org . That ...

Well, apparently I should just retire.  According to this article at the National Post, "Higgs boson discovery may signal the world’s ...

Happy 2013 to all!  The Proceedings of the Royal Society A has a special issue from this past fall about the issue of decoherence in quantu...

There is a new result in this week's issue of Nature that is very neat (and my college classmate Young Lee is the PI - small world!). ...

In an extremely timely article in the new issue of American Scientist , Joseph Grcar looks at what fraction of publications in various dis...

A couple of my colleagues pointed me to this blog , that of  Raphaël Lévy at Liverpool.  Lately it has become a clearing house for informat...

Today we had a visit at Rice from Mike Mayberry , the VP for the Technology and Manufacturing group at Intel.  He gave a very good talk abou...

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...