Scott Epstein's Page

Here is a link to a presentation Mildred Dresselhaus gave in November 2008. Runs as a Flash presentation.

Happy holidays and Happy New Year to everyone out there.

If anyone has seen Avatar yet—or even the trailer—one of the McGuffins is a material called "unobtanium." (Which looked like a chunk of mica to me...:)) It is a material that is apparently cheaper to transport several light years rather than synthesize.

Anyone care to speculate on what sort of material that could be? (We would have to assume that it is a compound, not some sort of new element, since a new heavy element would probably be unstable and radioactive, and we aren't told that t… Continue

A little off-topic, but still really cool. Nature is reporting that researchers have found an exoplanet around a red dwarf that they believe is covered with water and ice VII. These results were reported by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The planet is the smallest and most Earth-like exoplanet found so far. It's larger than Earth, with high atmospheric pressure greater than 16 Bar, meaning that even though the surface temperature is about 200C, liquid water would exist at the… Continue

So, here's the thing—from the materials science POV, anyway—about SpaceShipTwo. Which is that this kind of tourist plane-launched suborbital craft is only possible with—advanced composite materials...