nanoscale views

While I've been absolutely buried under deadlines, it's been a crazy week for US science, and things are unlikely to calm down anyti...

Three papers caught my eye the other day on the arXiv at the start of the new year: arXiv:2501.00098 - J. Yu et al ., "Quantum geometr...

As we head into 2025, and the prospects for increased (US) government investment in science, engineering, and STEM education seem very limit...

In the grand tradition of physicists writing about areas outside their expertise, I wanted to put down some thoughts on a societal trend.  T...

As we head toward the end of the calendar year, a few items: Google published a new result in Nature a few days ago.  This made a big news...

From the medical diagnostic perspective (and for many other applications), you can understand why it might be very convenient to be able to ...

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 ...