nanoscale views

Thank you, readers, for another year.  It is gratifying to hear from you and to meet people who have found this blog useful and informative ...

Last week I received an email from a scientist asking me for a copy of one of my articles, and the correspondent pointed out:  "On a ta...

It's been a very hectic end-of-semester, between classes, research, and writing.  Thank all of you for your replies concerning power out...

I'm trying to gather some information, informally.  If you're at a tier-1 research university in the US or Canada, please tell me ho...

Several interesting links have crossed my virtual radar this past week. Here is a (rather over-written) article about how one of the big ...

I've been asked by a colleague to write a post about coauthorship.  This topic comes up often in courses on scientific ethics and respon...

Physicists sometimes like to use dramatic terminology to describe phenomena or ideas.  For example, the Ultraviolet Catastrophe was the phr...

Paul Weiss and the editorial board of ACS Nano seem to have ignited a bit of a controversy with their editorial published a couple of weeks...

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...