nanoscale views

Sorry for the posting drought.  There is a good reason:  I'm in the final stages of a textbook based on courses I developed about nanost...

I mentioned back in February that I'd had the chance to speak at Nerd Nite Houston ( facebook link - it's updated more frequently...

Slow blogging - I've got the usual papers plus working on finishing a really big writing project (more about that soon), combined w/ sum...

There has been a big kerfluffle about Facebook conducting a mass social psychology experiment.  At heart is the issue of informed consent.  ...

Another realization I had at the Gordon Conference:  there are plenty of younger people in condensed matter physics who have never heard abo...

Because of travel constraints I'm missing the last day of the meeting, but here are some thoughts, non-science first: These meetings r...

I am going to be at the Gordon Research Conference on correlated electrons for the next few days. Should be fun, but blogging about such me...

I'd heard rumors about this for a while.  I presume that the posting of this on the arxiv means that some form of this paper is in subm...

This is the 750th post since this blog's inception.  Fun facts gleaned from google analytics: 1) Unsurprisingly, the US leads in blog ...

Chemists (and physicists) often draw molecular bonds as little lines connecting atoms, but actually imaging the bonds themselves is very har...

A colleague of mine was depressed to find, in a reasonably high impact journal, a statement that magnetic nanoparticles obey Coulomb's l...

Blatant self-promotion time:  I was grateful for the invitation to write an editorial about teaching "nano" for Nature Nanotechn...

I've been meaning to do a post on this for a long time.  Five years ago (!) I wrote a post about the meaning of temperature , where I t...

Once again the Breakthrough Prize and New Horizons Prize in fundamental physics are seeking nominations.  See here .  I have very mixed feel...

I've spent the last two days at a fun " Physics at the Falls " workshop at the University of Buffalo.  It's been cool lear...

The end of our academic year + travel + some major writing has cramped my blogging of late.  Things should pick back up to a more regular pa...

Let me pose a puzzle.  Suppose you are in a completely dark room.  You know that at some point in the future, someone will turn on a light i...

I wrote before about the saga of the NNIN and how painful the outcome was this year - no awards made, after thousands of person-hours inves...

Very often in condensed matter (or atomic) physics we are interested in trying to calculate the rate of some quantum process - this could be...

I was absolutely horrified to read about this story , about how more than 200 girls were kidnapped in Nigeria by a radical Islamic group bec...