nanoscale views

Phase transitions are amazing things.  As some knob is turned (temperature, pressure, magnetic field), a physical system undergoes a sudden...

Resurfacing briefly in the midst of proposal writing, I feel compelled to comment on recent media coverage of Lisa Randall's new book . ...

Friday evening I went to the Katy Independent School District's Robert R. Shaw Center for STEAM , where they were having a Science Movie...

I'm heavily into some writing obligations right now, but I wanted to point out a few things: Obviously this year's Nobel in physi...

A quick question in the hopes that some people in this blog's readership have direct experience:  Anyone work with a table-top scanning ...

It's getting to be that time of year again.  The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced this coming Tuesday morning (EU/US time)....

Things I learned from the last (half)day of the DOE PI meeting: "vortex explosion" would be a good name for a 1980s metal band....

Among the things I learned at the second day of the meeting: In relatively wide quantum wells, and high fields, you can enter the quantum...

Things I learned at today's session of the DOE ECMP PI meeting: In the right not-too-thick, not-too-thin layers of the 3d topological ...

As they did two years ago, the Basic Energy Sciences part of the US DOE is having a gathering of experimental condensed matter physics inve...

Apologies for the slower posting frequency.  Other obligations ( grants, research, teaching, service ) are significant right now. I though...

Ernest Rutherford reportedly said something like, if your experiment needs statistics, you should have done a better experiment.  Sometimes ...

When I was a kid, I heard about the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, a national science fair competition that sparked the imaginations ...

Recently I've come across some good examples of multidisciplinary science communication.  The point of commonality:  narrative tension, ...

I went to an interesting lunchtime talk today by Sergio Kapusta , former chief scientist of Shell .  He gave a nice overview of the oil/gas ...

I have written multiple times ( here and here , for example) about my concern that the structure of financial incentives and corporate gove...

A few brief news items - our first week of classes this term is a busy time. Here is a video of Richard Feynman, explaining why he can...

As an undergrad, I was a mechanical engineering major doing an engineering physics program from the engineering side.  When I was a sophomo...

There has been a lot of interest online recently about the " drought balls " that the state of California is using to limit unwant...

When I was a first-year grad student, I started working in my adviser 's lab, learning how to do experiments at extremely low temperatur...