nanoscale views

 In the forward-looking spirit of the New Year, it might be fun to get readers’ opinions of their favorite science fiction inventions.  I wr...

Thoughts at the end of another busy year…. Good science is a creative enterprise.  Some stereotypes paint most scientists as toiling away, s...

 This year was a busy one and my overall posting rate is down.  Hopefully the coming year will be a bit less frenetic, but who knows.  A few...

There is a press conference going on right now announcing a breakthrough at the National Ignition Facility at Livermore .   The NIF is an ...

I was busy trying to finish off a grant proposal and paper revisions this week and didn't have the time to react in realtime to the PR o...

Computing is consuming a large and ever-growing fraction of the world's energy capacity. I've seen the essential data in this figure...

I went to a memorial service today at Rice for my late colleague Bob Curl , who died this past summer, and it was a really nice event.  I me...

The last couple of weeks have been very full.   One event was the annual Welch Foundation conference ( program here ).  The program chair f...

As I have posted in previous years, Rice has a university-wide endowed honorific postdoctoral program called the Rice Academy of Fellows .  ...

The NSF Division of Materials Research has been soliciting input from the community about both the biggest outstanding problems in condense...

A couple of years ago I wrote about our work on "above threshold" light emission in planar metal tunnel junctions.  In that work...

The Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University invites applications for a tenure-track faculty position in the area of experime...

 Some news items of interest: Three weeks old now, but this story about IBM cooling down their enormous dilution refrigerator setup got my...

Monoclinic VO2, adapted from here As I wrote last year , techniques have been developed in the last decade or two that use the inverse spin ...

I'm going to be presenting a continuing education course starting next month, trying to give a general audience introduction to some key...

Surfacing from being submerged by other responsibilities (including jury duty today), I wanted to point out two paper. This preprint (based...

An administrative role I've taken on for the last month that will run through September has been eating quite a bit of my time, but I wa...

In thinking about presenting physics to a lay audience, I think we haven't sufficiently emphasized what we mean by particles or objects ...

On a recommendation, I just finished reading The Cold Wars:  A History of Superconductivity , by Jean Matricon and Georges Waysand.  This bo...

This isn't physics, but it's still something that might be of interest to some readers.  There is still a great deal of mystery amon...