From the category archives:

Bloggy-blogging

Mission of Gravity, Part 3:
GOCE updates the shape of the Earth

June 28, 2010

The GOCE satellite flies extraordinarily low and it thrusts constantly to compensate for air drag while making exquisite measurements of the gravitational gradient. The just-released result is a map of the geoid — the gravitational equipotential surface of the Earth — shown below as a delta from an idealized ellipsoid. GOCE can measure the geoid [...]

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When a bureaucrat is a physicist…

May 27, 2010

How do you see whether critical valves in a blowout protector are open or closed, a mile deep in the sea and through inches of steel?
Gamma-ray imaging, as suggested by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu:
Atlantic: How is it that you know enough about gamma rays and oil spill technology to be helpful? I wasn’t aware [...]

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Irrational drug design, malaria,
and Alzheimer’s disease

May 24, 2010

Irrational drug design (aka high-throughput screening) parallels other areas of data-driven science: it abandons the methodology of traditional hypothesis-driven science — which demands a focus on specific predictions — and pursues instead the weak and humble hypothesis that looking in a general area will find something. As I discussed here, genomics and synoptic sky [...]

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Flattening the Matterhorn

May 19, 2010

Text and graphics excerpted from Figure 4 of a recent paper on a new form of nanoscale lithography:
AFM scan of the replica of the Matterhorn written into the molecular glass (3D data source: geodata © swisstopo).
The maximum steepness of slopes is an important parameter in scanning probe lithography. It would be easy to misread the [...]

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A brief post about brief posts

May 16, 2010

This post is displayed on Metamodern in a new format designed for brief posts, to be categorized as “Brevia”. This (and a bunch of other changes) reflects an upgrade in my WordPress theme, Thesis.
The typical WordPress theme centers a style provided by an HTML template, but Thesis is more like a PHP app. It has [...]

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Globe Forum afterword & environmental posts

May 4, 2010

I’m back from Globe Forum 2010, a meeting that brings together leaders of innovative businesses focused on sustainability. A major theme at the meeting was, of course, greenhouse gases and climate change. My talk emphasized that high CO2 levels will persist for decades (even with heroically deep cuts in CO2 emissions) unless we implement large-scale [...]

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Liveblogging Globe Forum 2010, Stockholm

April 29, 2010

A bit of liveblogging, at least. I’m in Stockholm for the Globe Forum 2010, resting for a moment after a talk and interviews. The Forum brings together people building businesses focused on sustainability. Work ranges from computational fluid dynamics for better wind energy to a technology that lays down nanoscale films of a tungsten disulphide [...]

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Self assembly and nanomachines:
Complexity, motion, and computational control

January 28, 2010

A commenter on the previous post raised several important issues, and my reply grew into this post. The comment is here, and my reply follows:

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Boronate esters, Suzuki coupling,
self-assembly, design software, etc.

January 24, 2010

I’ve been exploring some recent developments in chemical synthesis and self-assembly that suggest attractive possibilities for engineering robust self-assembling molecular systems. Boronate esters are involved in two ways.
Two days ago, I sat down to write about this, but then I read further into the literature, and learned substantially more. Yesterday, another cycle of the [...]

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The Wall Street Journal on Feynman,
Drexler, History, and the Future

January 9, 2010

The Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday, “Feynman and the Futurists”, about Feynman’s ideas, mine, how the nanotechnology bandwagon got rolling, and how the band got thrown off the wagon — and then, out of the shadows, the NRC report and why the U.S. government should implement the NRC’s recommendations.

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