nanoscale views

I had heard some gossip about this from a couple of my colleagues last week, and now it would appear that the news has broken in the English...

This past week, I noticed two preprints on the arxiv that particularly got my attention. First, "How many is different?" In co...

The workshop here was, I think, very successful.  It was great to get so many knowledgeable people together in one place to talk about these...

Today is the beginning of our workshop on "Surface Plasmons, Metamaterials, and Catalysis", hosted here at Rice.  I've mentio...

There are many resources out there for people who want guidance on scientific writing.  Here, in very brief form, are my tips. First, do s...

Many out there in the science blogging community have been rightly angered and frustrated by what transpired last week regarding Danielle Le...

I have been very busy, and I missed my traditional Nobel guessing game.  To be honest, it seems so highly likely that there will be some ver...

Sorry for the comparatively slow rate of posts - it's an extremely busy time of the semester, and travel last week threw me off.  Here a...

Very brief list of things I learned about during day 2 yesterday: Due to optical nonlinearities, it is possible to get broadband negative ...

Yesterday was an extremely dense meeting day.  Many talks, many posters.  By its nature, this meeting is far more technical than the Packard...

I am spending the next 2.5 days at the DOE's experimental CMP principal investigator meeting in the Washington DC area.  I'll try to...

For the 25th anniversary of the amazingly awesome David and Lucille Packard Foundation fellowships, I was fortunate (and as always very grat...

I've written before ( here , here and here ) about the use of ionic liquids in condensed matter physics investigations.  These remarkab...

There are large, endowed prizes in a number of disciplines.  The most famous of all are the Nobel prizes , of course, and in the sciences a...

I'm writing this at the suggestion of a commenter on my previous how-to post, who was specifically interested in experiment/theory inter...

Now that we live in the Information Age , where I am reliably told that Information Wants to be Free , I'm confused by a trend that is c...

I think I'm going to start a periodic series of "how to" posts.  First up, how to write a decent "response to referees...

I (along with my departmental colleagues) was very happy to see this .  My department does extremely well in a particular ranking scheme (de...

As long-time readers here know, I'm not a big fan of hype and press releases.  While it is very important to let people know what academ...

I'm back, though now I'm in the writing-six-things-before-the-term mode, so blogging will likely continue to be sparse.   Several of...