Let me borrow a riff from co-blogger Allyson: Forgive me, readers, for I have slacked (from blogging, that is). It has been 50 phone calls, 200 emails, seven meetings, four gym workouts, three dinners, two "events", one screening, and a dental appointment since my last blog post. That's the downside...

*Raises right hand* I am not now, nor have I ever been, a gamer. A horrible confession for any geek to make, I know, but most video games bore and frustrate me. I tried Myst early on and got totally fed up; it felt too much like taking the logic section of my GREs: I've tried everything I can th...

Fans of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are familiar with the fictional Infinite Improbability Drive that powers the spaceship Heart of Gold . It allows for faster-than-light travel, per Adams, and is based on one of the central peculiarities of quantum physics: the notion that a sub...

I'm here! Where's the beer? Oh, right, it's a virtual cocktail party. *waves* Hi, folks; me again, your friendly neighborhood, er, whatever. If you've been hanging around here for awhile, you've seen me before. This is my twelfth post for the Cocktail Party (unbelievable, I know) and I'm delighted t...

Stanford physicists are apparently marching to the beat of a nanoscale drummer these days, according to a paper in the February 8 issue of Science. Yeah, it's a bad pun, but Jen-Luc Piquant couldn't resist. And I couldn't resist writing about research that combines acoustics, scanning tunneling micr...