nanoscale views

No, NASA has not discovered warp drive.  There is a huge amount of media attention ( here , here , here , for examples of relatively mainstr...

I know this will come as a shock to many of you (ahem), but when I was a kid I watched a lot of Star Trek reruns.  Even in middle school one...

A key aspect of a good graduate education is realizing, more than ever, that to be competitive you'll have to raise your game. My coh...

I've been thinking about what a more general audience likes to read in terms of science writing beyond descriptions of cool science.  In...

There are a number of interesting physicsy science stories out there right now: SpaceX came very very close to successfully landing and ...

The transfer of heat, the energy content of materials tied to the disorganized motion of their constituents, is big business.  A typical car...

Fear not, a new post is coming soon, but for now I'm trying to finish off a proposal.

I'm late to the party about Fareed Zakaria's piece in the Washington Post titled " Why America's Obsession with STEM Educat...

We've all been there:  You wash your hands after using the restroom facilities, and turn away from the sink only to find one of those sa...

Cleanrooms - basically climate-controlled, dust-mitigated environments filled with equipment useful for micro/nanoscale fabrication and asso...

Here are a couple of interesting things I've come across in terms of public science outreach lately: I generally f-ing love " I ...

Most people who aren't experts in the field don't really appreciate how amazing our electronic device capabilities are in integrated...

Back in the ancient mists of time, I did my doctoral work studying tunneling two-level systems (TLS) in disordered solids.  What do these wo...

We had a great colloquium here today by Dave DeMille from Yale University.   He spoke about his group's collaborative measurements (wo...

I am sufficiently buried in work, it's been difficult to come up with my annual March Meeting blog reports.  Here is a very brief list o...

This has been an absurdly busy period for the last few weeks; hence my lower rate of posting.  I hope that this will resolve itself relative...

One hallmark of the modern research university is the proliferation of Centers and Institutes, groupings of investigators outside the hierar...

To quote this blog from about 8.5 years ago (!):  For years now, there has been a fairly heated debate about the nature of an apparent ...

Over the last week I've run into a couple of readers of this blog who pointed out that many people never find older posts (unless they h...

Once you accept the idea that the simple, microscopic interactions between bits of matter can lead to the emergence of dramatic collective ...