Physics Today's Web Watch

http://www.ibm.com/patents
If you studied last month's article on patent basics for physicists, by James Richardson and Craig Wood (Physics Today, April, page 32), perhaps you're now considering patenting your design for a nanotechnology mousetrap. To check if anyone has patented a similar device in the past 26 years, go to this IBM patent search Web site. The site provides the text descriptions from patents issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) since 1971 and images of patents issued since 1980. When the images from 1971-80 are added, the site will boast over a terabyte of data, stored on about 2800 CD-ROMs.

http://www.uspto.gov/
The USPTO home page has a variety of patent and trademark information, and allows searching of its on-line patent bibliographic database, which goes back to 1976. It also provides an extensive list of international patent offices.

http://astro.nmsu.edu/~cgarasi/astropp.html
This student resource page is intended for graduate and undergraduate students seeking employment or funding. Space science is emphasized but many of the links are of more general interest. The page provides numerous links to US national laboratories and government research agencies, and to information on fellowships, summer programs and job search engines.

More BEC: Readers have recommended two sites for adding to our March list of atom laser and Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) sites. One is the special issue on BEC of the Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (July-August 1996). The lead-off article is a very readable February 1996 colloquium on BEC by Eric Cornell. All the articles are available in pdf (portable document format). The other site is the BEC page of the University of Oxford BEC theory team.

Both of these sites and numerous others on BEC can be found linked to the Georgia Southern University BEC home page listed in the Web Watch for March.

Compiled by Graham P. Collins