When I was an undergrad at Berkeley, aside from doing radio astronomy, I worked in Paul McEuen’s lab examining electronic transport in nanostructures, working especially with a great postdoc named David Cobden. Looking through the contents of last week’s Nature, it was a fun surprise to see pieces by both of these people: one paper, from David Cobden’s group at the University of Washington, is on the remarkable coexistence of three electronic phases, two insulating and one metallic, in the strange material vanadium dioxide. The other, from Paul McEuen, is a review of Margaret Atwood’s new novel, MaddAddam. (Sadly, there were no articles from me in Nature…)
Why is there a review of a novel in Nature? MaddAddam is the third in Atwood’s recent series of biotechnologically-dystopian books, following Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. Both of these are excellent — I especially liked The Year of the Flood, but this could be because I read it first, not realizing that it followed the other. I was very happy to learn a few weeks ago that this new book will appear! (I haven’t read Paul’s review, since I don’t want to know more about the book before reading it.) Why is a physicist writing book reviews? In addition to being an excellent scientist and a really nice person, Paul is a novelist himself! See: http://www.amazon.com/Spiral-A-Novel-Paul-McEuen/dp/038534211X.
Incidentally, I’ll continue my previous vacation-interrupted cooking post some time later…
The Eighteenth Elephant 