nanoscale views

When the news is filled with bleak items, like: The deaths of prominent scientists   The deaths of many notable figures (too many to...

A few weeks ago I posted about one approach to mapping out where current flows at the nanoscale, scanning gate microscopy .   I had made an...

It's been a little while (ok, 1.6 years) since I made a few posts  about recurring motifs that crop up in physics, particularly in con...

Many elemental metals become superconductors at sufficiently low temperatures, but not all.  Ironically, some of the normal metal elements w...

I'd be curious for opinions out there regarding available textbooks for "Modern Physics".  Typically this is a sophomore-level...

Much has been written about quantum computers and their prospects for doing remarkable things (see here for one example of a great primer ),...

Some additional brief items: Rice's Smalley-Curl Institute has two competitive, endowed postdoctoral opportunities coming up, the J....

A handful of brief items: A biologist former colleague has some good advice on writing successful NSF proposals that translates well to ...

As alluded to in my previous posts on metamaterials and metasurfaces , there have been some recently published papers that take these ideas...

As I alluded in my previous post , metamaterials are made out of building blocks, and thanks to the properties of those building blocks and ...

(This is part of a lead-in to a brief discussion I'd like to do of two papers that just came out.) The wikipedia entry for metamaterial ...

Just in case anyone out there is interested, Rice is beginning a search for the next dean of our George R. Brown School of Engineering .

How do we tell the temperature of some piece of material?  I've written about temperature and thermometry a couple of times before ( her...

In the spirit of this post , it seems like it would be a good idea to write something about this paper  (accompanying LBL press release ), p...

Update :  well, I was completely wrong!  Topology ruled the day.  I will write more later about this, but  Congratulations to Thouless, Kos...

Inspired by a metaphor made by our colloquium speaker, Prof. Silke Paschen , this past week, I'd like to try to explain to a general aud...

  Michael Filler  is a chemical engineering professor at Georgia Tech, developing new and interesting nanomaterials.  He is also the host o...

As was pointed out by a commenter on my previous post, and mentioned here by ZapperZ , atomic physicist Deborah Jin passed away last week f...

Tomorrow I'll be a participant in an all-day workshop that Rice's Center for Teaching Excellence will be hosting with representativ...

An underappreciated part of a scientific career is "professional service" - reviewing papers and grant proposals, filling roles in...