nanoscale views

Not that prizes are the be-all and end-all, but this has become an annual tradition.  Who are your speculative laureates this year for physi...

Sometimes there are upticks in the rate of fun reading material.  In the last few days: A Nature  paper has been published by a group of au...

 Two very brief items of interest: This article is a nice popular discussion of the history of fiber optics and the remarkable progress it...

There is a paper in Science this week that is just a great piece of work.  The authors find that by dyeing living tissue with a particular ...

The start of the semester has been very busy, but here are some items that seem interesting: As many know, there has been a lot of controver...

When we teach undergraduates about materials and measuring electrical resistance, we tend to gloss over the fact that there are specialized ...

Note: this post is a semi-rant about US funding for science education; if this isn't your cup of tea, read no further. Two years ago, th...

 A couple of interesting papers that I came across this week: There is long been an interest in purely electronic cooling techniques (no mov...

In these unsettling and trying times, I wanted to write about the physics of a challenge I'm facing in my professional life: super squea...

Real life continues to make itself felt in various ways this summer (and that's not even an allusion to political madness), but here are...

Last week I was at the every-2-years Gordon Research Conference on Correlated Electron Systems at lovely Mt. Holyoke.  It was very fun, but...

Fluid mechanics is very often left out of the undergraduate physics curriculum.  This is a shame, as it's very interesting and directly ...

Disclaimer and disclosure:  The " arrogant physicist declaims about some topic far outside their domain expertise (like climate change...

Looking back, I realized that I haven't written much about halide perovskites , which is quite an oversight given how much research impa...

 Real life continues to be busy, but I wanted to point out three recent articles that I found interesting: Mechanical resonators are a topic...

The Wall Street Journal last week had an article (sorry about the paywall) titled " There’s Not Enough Power for America’s High-Tech A...

When I was a kid, I used to take allowance money and occasionally buy rubber-band-powered balsa wood airplanes at a local store.  Maybe you...

One of the biggest condensed matter trends in recent years has been the stacking of 2D materials and the development of moiré lattices .  Th...

 Three items of interest: This article is a nice review of present semiconductor memory technology.  The electron micrographs in Fig. 1 and...

Real life has been very busy recently.  Posting will hopefully pick up soon.   One brief item.  Earlier this week, Rice hosted Gabi Kotliar ...