Been there…got the t-shirt
APS memorabilia: these will be worth a fortune on eBay someday. I actually didn’t buy an APS t-shirt — or a bumper sticker, slinky or travel mug — but I’m still glad I came to ...
A little bang at SLAC
What’s the best way to determine the structure of a molecule that cannot be integrated within a periodic lattice? Blow the heck out of it using x-ray pulses from the Linac Coherent Light Source ...
The great pages debate
IOP Publishing’s reception was a big hit last night, judging by the fact that the buffet had to be replenished several times — you can work up a huge appetite running back and forth betwee...
Brrr…it's cold in there
Some of the most interesting condensed matter physics occurs at very low temperatures and physicists need accurate ways of knowing just how cold their samples are. Traditionally, this has meant spendi...
On to the exhibition
I was having so much fun with the physicists that I nearly forgot to check out the exhibition before it closed for good this afternoon. First stop was the IOP Publishing stand where I had a chat with ...
Living surfaces self-organize
Here’s a new recipe from Jeffrey Brinker of the University of New Mexico (P42 1) Mix together water, alcohol, detergent, silica and a good dollop of single-cell organisms. Dip in a substrate of ...
'Buckets of BEC with inter-bucket tunnelling'
What? Not Mott? Pots not dots, lots per pot …and hot! You can only get away with describing your experiment with a poem if you have a Nobel Prize — and JILA’s Eric Cornell has one of...
Visible invisibility cloak?
Purdue University’s Vladimir Shalaev is giving the following paper tomorrow : “Negative-Index Metamaterials in the Visible Range” (W38 1). Could this be the first invisibility cloak ...
Facts and opinion about graphene
Graphene guru Pablo Jarillo-Herrero of Columbia University set me straight on the miraculous flakes of carbon. -There were 180 papers published on graphene in the last year, but less than 10% were exp...
Commercial high-Tc applications
In my entry on “Rock star physicists” I said that there are no commercially viable applications of high Tc superconductors. I have just discovered that this could be wrong — at least...
