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Michael Banks

I am news editor of Physics World magazine. I also contribute regularly to the website and work on the Physics World special report programme. I joined Physics World in 2008 after completing a PhD in condensed-matter physics at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany. I mostly cover the development of physics facilities around the world. Outside work, over the past couple of years I have become particularly adept at changing nappies.

Author archive

Glue and cuprates

Glue and cuprates

One of the most sought after theories in condensed matter physics is that of high temperature superconductivity. It is hard to walk into these kind of talks and understand what is going on. If it is theory, it’s next to impossible as the first slide almost jumps into a large Hamiltonian, and as I guess […]

Comparisons

Comparisons

Being at the APS meeting last year in Denver, I can’t help but think about some comparisons. Although I was at the march meeting last year in a different capacity (as a researcher, giving my 10+2 minute talk), It seems to me that the scale of this year’s event is much smaller compared to last […]

Hurricanes and extreme weather systems

Hurricanes and extreme weather systems

Now for a topic that is close to the heart for many inhabitants of New Orleans – hurricanes. The devastation caused by the events in 2005 by hurricane Katrina led to most of the inhabitants of New Orleans to be displaced and caused news and debate around the world for months – still today, nearly […]

Baseball and steroids

Baseball and steroids

How much do drugs affect the performance of athletes and more interestingly how can we quantify such enhanced performance? That was the question that Roger Tobin, a condensed matter physicist from Tufts University, posed in his talk on ‘Sox and Drugs: Baseball, steroids and physics’. Quantifying enhancement is an interesting question, if someone takes drugs […]

Annealing at 1K

Annealing at 1K

My first session was on supersolid He-4, up bright and early for the 8am start. The paper under discussion for the first talk appeared in Nature last year by Xi Lin and colleagues from Penn State University. They looked at the heat capacity of He-4 at low temperature (T < 0.5 K), and reported a […]

Arrived and ready

Arrived and ready

The 21 hour door-to-door trip is past us now as we focus on the start of the conference tomorrow. We arrived at the hotel early on Sunday morning after a quick connection in Chicago. The whole trip from Heathrow to New Orleans went quite smoothly, except for the need to change planes in Chicago after […]

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