Condensed concepts

In 1994 superconductivity was discovered in strontium ruthenate (Sr2RuO4). This attracted considerable interest because it had a perovskite...

 Discovering new materials with functional properties is hard, very hard. We need all the tools we can from serendipity to high-performance ...

The theoretical physicist Ettore Majorana mysteriously disappeared in 1938. Unfortunately, Majorana particles are also going to be associat...

Everyone likes to be right. But, sometimes I really wish I was wrong, particularly about problems I see in the world. I wish I was wrong abo...

I want to begin by stating some hypotheses. Some may be obvious. Others may be contentious. I will number them so that people can easily mak...

Unfortunately, there is a paucity of good review articles that give gentle introductions to current research in condensed matter, both for b...

Writing a paper is hard work. Writing a paper that is clear, engaging, and accurate is even harder. After you have written a draft or are re...

My mental health this year has been up and down. It is not particularly clear why I have struggled at times, given the sources of stress wer...

The physics arXiv started way back in 1991. Yet chemists strongly resisted following suit. Indeed if you posted a preprint on the arXiv Amer...

Don't follow the pack! I just read the  Random Walk to Graphene , by Andre Geim. It is the lecture he gave when receiving the 2010 ...

Tomorrow I am giving a talk about academic publishing for a group of faculty and Ph.D students from African universities. The challenges the...

As I have written many times before, water is fascinating, a rich source of diverse and unusual phenomena, and an unfortunate source of spur...

I never thought I would write a post linking the two issues in the title. I have been working on my talk on mental health for the School ...

A colleague was recently distressed to find a significant error in a paper he had just published. There was a sign error in one calculation ...

There is an excellent editorial in the journal Langmuir Writing Theory and Modeling Papers for Langmuir: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly H...

The problem of the irreproducibility of many results in psychology and medical research is getting a lot of attention. There is even an Wiki...

I am not a big fan of the peer review process. Too often it is a superficial ritual that adds little scientific value. Nevertheless, when it...

My post, "Do we need more journals?" generated a lot of comments, showing that the associated issues are something people have st...

NO! Nature Publishing Group continues to spawn "Baby Natures" like crazy. I was disappointed to see that Physical Review is la...

A referee for a recent paper, entitled "Effect of hydrogen bonding on infrared absorption intensity" , suggested that we should ad...