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...
Three for medical physics
I just came out of a medical physics press conference that presented three very different ways that physics can be put to use saving lives. The first presentation was from David Nolte of Purdue Univer...
Standing room only for graphene
The room was packed to the rafters for Tsuneya Ando’s talk on “Theory of quantum transport in graphene and nanotubes” (H28 1), which kicked off the first of five focus sessions on gr...
Day two beckons
It’s day two of the March meeting and after cutting my teeth yesterday on some lighter material it’s time to get stuck into some serious physics. The first thing on the agenda is graphene....
Rock star physicists
What do superconductor expert Paul Chu and Jimi Hendrix have in common? They were both on stage at the “Woodstock” of their respective professions — at least according to the APS, wh...
