nanoscale views

As one of the only surviving nano-related blogs, I feel somewhat obligated to write a post about this.  Charles Lieber , chair of the depart...

One of the great things about a good university is the variety of excellent talks that you can see.  Yesterday we had our annual Chapman L...

Here are some items of interest: An attempt to lay out a vision for research in the US beyond Science: The Endless Frontier .  The evolv...

The Wolf Prize in Physics for 2020 was announced yesterday, and it's going to Pablo Jarillo-Herrero , Allan MacDonald , and Rafi Bistri...

I'm looking more seriously at trying to do some popularly accessible writing about condensed matter.  I have a number of ideas about wha...

Happy new year.  As we head into 2020, here are a few links I've been meaning to point out: This paper  is a topical review of high-t...

Crystals are fascinating.  Somehow, for reasons that don't seem at all obvious at first glance, some materials grow in cool shapes as s...

Modern outdoor decorations owe quite a bit to modern science - polymers; metallurgy; electric power for the lighting, fans, sensors, and mot...

(In response to a topic suggestion from the Pizza Perusing Physicist....) Neuromorphic computing is a trendy concept aimed at producing ...

Here are some tidbits that came across my eyeballs this past week: I just ran into this article from early in 2019.  It touches on my di...

I wrote recently about phases of matter  (and longer ago here ).  The phase that tends to get short shrift in the physics curriculum is the ...

Today we had a seminar at Rice by Qian Niu of the University of Texas, and it was a really nice, pedagogical look at this paper  (arxiv ver...

Here are a few interesting results I stumbled upon recently: This preprint has become this Science paper that was published this week.  ...

Many many people have written about how to write scientific grant proposals, and much of that advice is already online.   Rather than duplic...

As I had posted a year ago:  Rice has a university-wide competitive postdoctoral fellow program known as the Rice Academy of Fellows .   Lik...

My apologies for the unusually long hiatus in posts.  Proposal deadlines + department chair obligations + multiple papers in process made th...

This continues to be a very very busy time, but here are a few interesting things to read: " Voodoo fusion " - an article from t...

As we await the announcement of this year's physics Nobel tomorrow morning (last chance for predictions in the comments), a brief note: ...

As I struggle with being swamped this semester, some news items: Scott Aaronson has a great summary/discussion about the forthcoming goog...

On the closing day of the PI meeting, some further points and wrap-up: I had previously missed work that shows that electric field can m...