nanoscale views

Foams can be great examples of mechanical metamaterials.   Adapted from TOC figure of this paper Consider my shaving cream.  You might imag...

Fig. 1 from the linked paper Here is a light-hearted bit of research that touches on some fun physics.  As you might readily imagine, there...

 A few tidbits that I encountered recently: The saga of Ranga Dias at Rochester draws to a close, as described by the Wall Street Journal ....

A helpful ad from Science Made Stupid . Since before the development of micro- and nanoelectromechanical techniques, there has been an inter...

Time for blogging has continued to be scarce, but here are a few papers to distract (and for readers who are US citizens:  vote if you have ...

As you can tell from my posting frequency lately, I have been unusually busy.  I hope to be writing about more condensed matter and nano sci...

I already wrote about this issue here back in August, but I wanted to highlight a policy statement that I wrote with colleagues as part of...

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 ...