Funny Journal Content

1. A candidate for the funniest journal title/paper graphic…
Here’s a cute paper: rolling a single molecular at the atomic scale. The authors look at C₄₄H₂₄, a molecule possessing two triptyene ‘wheels’ (with three ‘paddles’, each) and thus two intramolecular degrees of freedom when adsorbed on a metal surface (the independent rotation of each wheel), and push it along with an STM tip. Interestingly, the STM current is a good indicater of what kind of motion the molecule is undergoing (’rolling’ versus ‘hopping’). What I find most amusing is that the molecule was previously used to construct a ‘molecular wheelbarrow’, a result which was published in Tetrahedron Letters - probably the funniest journal title I’ve come across - and includes the following priceless graphic:

2. Can a biologist fix a radio? Or, what one scientist learned while studying apoptosis
Speaking of funny papers, this paper by Yuri Lazebnick (via Structure+Strangeness) is great. Here’s an excerpt, dealing with the question of how would a biologist fix a radio, knowing only that it is a box meant to play music?

How would we begin? First, we would secure funds to obtain a large supply of identical functioning radios in order to dissect and compare them to the one that is broken. We would eventually find how to open the radios and will find objects of various shape, color, and size. We would describe and classify them into families according to their appearance. We would describe a family of square metal objects, a family of round brightly colored objects with two legs, round-shaped objects with three legs and so on. Because the objects would vary in color, we will investigate whether changing the colors affects the radio’s performance. Although changing the colors would have only attenuating effects (the music is still playing but a trained ear of some people can discern some distortion), this approach will produce many publications and result in a lively debate.

3. Formation of a nematic fluid at high fields in Sr₃Ru₂O₇:
I had quite a lengthy post on electronic liquid crystals in 2-dimensional electron gases (e.g. GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructures) a while back, and briefly noted that:

Scientists in Europe have measured a large magnetoresistive anisotropy in the correlated electron oxide strontium ruthenate (Sr₃Ru₂O₇) near the ‘metamagnetic quantum critical point’, indicating the formation of a new quantum nematic phase. This is strikingly similar to the tranport anisotropy in 2DEGs I’ve been talking about… in particular, both show strong sensitivity to disorder - and the authors claim that the formation of this phase is tuned by the divergence in the quasiparticle effective mass near this critical point. One can only wonder what other kinds of systems could yield such behavior as well.

This European work is now one of the feature papers for the online Journal Club for Condensed Matter Physics, with a far more in-depth (yet very readable) commentary by Catherine Kallin of McMaster University in Canada.

4. Links!

Nanoscale/Condensed-Matter/Quantum Physics:
- Travis Hime proposes a new nanoscale electric guitar, while Paul McEuen develops a new graphene drumkit (or so the media says)
- Hanbury-Brown, Twiss, and ‘bunched up’ particles: the social life of atoms (previously been blogged about, too)
- Ultradense molecular memory at the nanoscale
- Patterning organic single-crystal transistor arrays
- Refrigerating electrons, one at a time
- 45-nm wide Intel transistors using high-k dielectrics
- Atom-by-atom extraction using STM (with a movie, too!)
- What can decoherence do for us?
- Beautiful pictures of superconducting quantum computer electronics (here, here and here - highly recommended)

(Of particular interest to me):
- Gate capacitance coupling of carbon nanotube thin-film transistors
- Transformation of spin information into large electrical signals using carbon nanotubes
- Electronics and chemistry: varying single-molecule junction conductance using chemical substituents
- 1/f^(gamma) tunnel current noise through Si-bound alkyl monolayers

Biophysics:
- Trapping motile magnetotactic bacteria with a magnetic recording head
- Biology’s next revolution: embracing collective phenomena
- Seeing biological membranes fuse using FRET

Other:
- Big scientific publishers take on the free-information movement
- Geoffrey Chang’s retractions, and a critic plugs good old fashioned biochemistry
- Flatland - the movie! (Again.)
- Why good binning is crucial in a histogram
- Statistics basics: correlation
- The Top Ten Things About Physics We Wish Everyone Knew