Annealing at 1K
My first session was on supersolid He-4, up bright and early for the 8am start. The paper under discussion for the first talk appeared in Nature last year by Xi Lin and colleagues from Penn State Univ...
Cold Fusion as Policy Posterboy
The March Meeting has everything, including a session on cold fusion. It is almost 20 years since Pons and Fleischmann told the world that they had seen nuclear fusion in what is essentially an electr...
Streetcar to the Garden District
It’s a lovely day in New Orleans and I managed to get a sunburn walking around the French Quarter this morning….I suppose I’m a real redneck now! Our hotel is right across the road f...
Arrived and ready
The 21 hour door-to-door trip is past us now as we focus on the start of the conference tomorrow. We arrived at the hotel early on Sunday morning after a quick connection in Chicago. The whole trip fr...
Off to New Orleans
Michael and I are leaving for New Orleans bright and early tomorrow morning — along with five other colleagues from IOP Publishing. Our journey begins in Bristol at about 9.30 in the morning and...
Looking forward to Chicago 2009
For those of you who went to this year’s AAAS meeting in Boston, now is a chance to sip coffee, recover from jet lag and go over all those indecipherable notes you took so hastily. For those of you ...
Vector inflation points the way
New model sheds light on universe’s near-smoothness
Who gets the cash?
“Is the title an oxymoron?” Harold Shapiro asked rhetorically at the beginning of his talk, The Responsible Use of Public Resources in Elementary Particle Physics. He wanted to show how one goes a...
Nuclear unknowns
Don Geesman of Argonne National Laboratory is well-known not only for his work on quarks but also for serenading his audience with folk songs about underground neutrino detectors (“For it’s dark a...
Freebie round-up
There’s not a fantastic selection of freebies at this year’s AAAS meeting, although there are one or two gems. A brain that sticks to walls, a pen that unfolds at the push of a button and — if y...
