Weathering the storm
"You can flood a city, but you can't drown a university", says Greg Seab, a physicist at the University of New Orleans who was speaking at a press conference on the impact of Katrina on local physics departments.
Author archive
A decade of the New Journal of Physics
So as not to be outdone by the APS, here’s a photo of a cake baked in honour of the 10th anniversary of IOP Publishing’s New Journal of Physics. The first-ever multi-discipline open access physics journal.
Happy Birthday, PRL
That’s some cake! Yesterday evening my IOP Publishing colleagues and I managed to blag our way into a posh reception celebrating 50 years of the journal Physical Review Letters. I forgot to take my camera, so the photo is courtesy of James Riordon at the APS. And yes, we did sing: Happy birthday Physical Review […]
A new spin on silicon and graphene
At last year’s March Meeting in Denver, Ian Appelbaum gave a ten-minute talk about how he had injected spin-polarized electrons into a piece of silicon, transported them micrometres and then detected a spin-polarized current at the other end. It was just one of thousands of talks given that year. But then Appelbaum published his results […]
Black holes as quantum-information mirrors
This is the tale of Alice, Bob and a black hole. Alice and Bob are a couple with a big communication problem — they only talk using quantum information systems. Usually this involves sending encrypted messages via quantum dots or entangled photons, which are unreliable at the best of times. But now Caltech’s John Preskill […]
Read article: Physicists and climate change
Physicists and climate change
How physicists are contributing to the study of climate change
Cats and dogs with their tails tied together
Yesterday I went to a news conference given by five physicists who believe that materials called “block copolymers” could help the electronics industry continue its relentless drive towards smaller and smaller devices — and even help battle some cancers. Block copolymers are a hot topic in nanotechnology because of their ability to self-organize into tiny […]
Stingy Uncle Sam
Here I am doing my bit to persuade the US government that it should give a little more money to the nation’s physicists. The photo was taken by the APS’s Tawanda Johnson, who was trying to get American physicists to write letters to their members of Congress asking them to support the provision of “supplemental […]
Cold Fusion as Policy Posterboy
The March Meeting has everything, including a session on cold fusion. It is almost 20 years since Pons and Fleischmann told the world that they had seen nuclear fusion in what is essentially an electro-chemistry experiment. The idea is that if you packed enough deuterium into a piece of palladium metal, the deuterium nuclei would […]
Streetcar to the Garden District
It’s a lovely day in New Orleans and I managed to get a sunburn walking around the French Quarter this morning….I suppose I’m a real redneck now! Our hotel is right across the road from the convention centre and there are now lots of physicists milling about — the excitement is building. Like myself, many […]
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