nanoscale views

As we approach the end of another year, I realize two things: Being chair has a measurable impact on my blogging frequency - it's dro...

The end of the calendar year has been very busy, leading to a slower pace of posting.  Just a few brief items: I have written a commentar...

Just in case.... Rice has a competitive endowed postdoctoral program, the Rice Academy of Fellows .  There are five slots for the coming y...

Shocking and saddening news this week about the death of Shoucheng Zhang , Stanford condensed matter theorist who had made extremely high im...

Last week, when I was doing some cooking for the US Thanksgiving holiday, I was making a really good vegetarian side dish (seriously, try i...

As was discussed in many places over the last two weeks, the official definition of the kilogram has now been changed, to a version direc...

This blog is hosted on blogger, google's free blogging platform.  There are a couple of ways to get statistics about the blog, like rate...

Apologies for the slow updates.  Between administrative responsibilities and trying to get out a couple of important papers, posting has bee...

On the day when the US switches clocks back to standard time, here is a post about timekeeping and its impact.   Conventional computers n...

If you're reading this, you've probably heard of imposter syndrome before - that feeling that, deep down, you don't really dese...

There is no question that the explosive spread of electronics and optoelectronic technology in the 20th century has its foundation in the gr...

Faculty position in Theoretical Biological Physics at Rice University As part of the Vision for the Second Century (V2C2) , which is focu...

A few interesting things I've found this past week: The connection between particle spin and quantum statistics (fermions = half-inte...

I was in a meeting at the beginning of the week where the topic of science and technology in policy-making came up.  One person in the meeti...

A fun question asked by a student in my class:  To what extent do you heat up your coffee by stirring it?  It was a huge conceptual advanc...

As my friend DanM pointed out in the comments of a previous post, it's Nobel season again, next Tuesday for physics.  Dan puts forward h...

At a recent DCMP meeting, my colleague Erica Carlson raised an important point:  Condensed matter physics as a discipline is almost certain...

While it's been a busy time, a couple of interesting papers caught my eye: arxiv:1808.07865 - Yankowitz et al., Tuning superconductiv...

As I mentioned previously, I've realized in recent weeks that many current students out there may never have heard of Jan Hendrik Schön ...

I've had a number of people ask me why I haven't written anything about the recent news and resulting kerfuffle ( here , here , and ...