nanoscale views

A blog about condensed matter and nanoscale physics. Why should high energy and astro folks have all the fun?

Thursday, August 28, 2025

25 years of Nano Letters

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Back in the dawn of the 21st century, the American Chemical Society founded a new journal, Nano Letters , to feature letters-length papers a...
4 comments:
Sunday, August 24, 2025

Learning and AI/LLMs - Why do we need to know or teach anything anymore?

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The fall semester is about to begin at my university, and I'm going to be teaching undergraduate statistical and thermal physics.  This ...
1 comment:
Saturday, August 16, 2025

20 years of Nanoscale Views, + a couple of things to read

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Amazingly, this blog has now been around for more than twenty years (!) - see this first post for reference from June of 2005, when I had m...
10 comments:
Thursday, August 07, 2025

Brief items - Static electricity, quantum geometry, Hubbard model, + news

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It's been a busy time that has cut into my blogging, but I wanted to point out some links from the past couple of weeks. Physics Today ...
3 comments:
Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Research experience for teachers - why NSF education funds matter

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The beginning of a RET poster session Research Experience for Teachers  (RET) programs are an example of the kind of programs that the Natio...
4 comments:
Friday, July 18, 2025

The latest on US science funding

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The US House and Senate appropriations subcommittees have now completed their markups on the bills relevant to the FY26 appropriations for N...
3 comments:
Friday, July 11, 2025

US science funding - now time to push on the House appropriators

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Some not-actively-discouraging news out of Washington DC yesterday:  The Senate appropriations committee is doing its markups of the various...
1 comment:
Tuesday, July 08, 2025

New updates + tetrahedra, tunneling times, and more

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Here are a number of items from the past week or so that I think readers of this blog might find interesting: Essentially all the news perta...
Monday, June 30, 2025

Science slow down - not a simple question

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I participated in a program about 15 years ago that looked at science and technology challenges faced by a subset of the US government. I ca...
7 comments:
Saturday, June 28, 2025

Cryogenic CMOS - a key need for solid state quantum information processing

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The basis for much of modern electronics is a set of silicon technologies called CMOS , which stands for complementary metal oxide semicondu...
3 comments:
Saturday, June 21, 2025

Brief items - fresh perspectives, some news bits

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As usual, I hope to write more about particular physics topics soon, but in the meantime I wanted to share a sampling of news items: First, ...
1 comment:
Sunday, June 15, 2025

So you want to build a science/engineering laboratory building

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A very quick summary of some non-negative news developments: The NSF awarded 500 more graduate fellowships this week, bringing the total fo...
11 comments:
Saturday, June 07, 2025

A precision measurement science mystery - new physics or incomplete calculations?

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Again, as a distraction from persistently concerning news, here is a science mystery of which I was previously unaware. The role of approxim...
3 comments:
Sunday, June 01, 2025

Pushing back on US science cuts: Now is a critical time

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Every week has brought more news about actions that, either as a collateral effect or a deliberate goal, will deeply damage science and engi...
8 comments:
Thursday, May 29, 2025

Quick survey - machine shops and maker spaces

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Recent events are very dire for research at US universities, and I will write further about those, but first a quick unrelated survey for th...
2 comments:
Thursday, May 22, 2025

How badly has NSF funding already been effectively cut?

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This NY Times feature lets you see how each piece of NSF's funding has been reduced this year relative to the normalized average spanni...
1 comment:
Sunday, May 18, 2025

A science anecdote palate cleanser

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Apologies for slow posting.  Real life has been very intense, and I also was rather concerned when one of my readers mentioned last weekend ...
2 comments:
Monday, May 05, 2025

Updates, thoughts about industrial support of university research

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Lots of news in the last few days regarding federal funding of university research: NSF has now frozen all funding for new and continuing a...
19 comments:
Friday, April 25, 2025

NSF, quo vadis?

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There is a lot going on.  Today, some words about NSF. Yesterday Sethuraman Panchanathan , the director of the National Science Foundation, ...
5 comments:
Sunday, April 20, 2025

A Grand Bargain and its chaotic dissolution

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After World War II, under the influence (direct and indirect) of people like Vannevar Bush , a "grand bargain" was effectively str...
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About Me

Douglas Natelson
I am a physics professor at Rice University. My group uses nanoscale tools to address open questions in condensed matter physics, the study of the remarkable emergent properties of materials. Views expressed here are my own; they do not represent the views of my employer or any other entity.
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