On the day that Steven Chu was undergoing his confirmation hearing for the Secretary of the Dept. of Energy position, his research paper was posted on ArXiv by one of his co-author.

Still, I wonder how much of this can he still do after he becomes the head of DOE. Will he have time to continue doing or be involved in research work, even on the peripheral? Can it also be a conflict of interest?

I doubt he'll have much time to do things like this on a regular basis once he starts spending more time heading up the DOE.

A new electron microscope recently installed in Cornell's Duffield Hall is enabling scientists for the first time to form images that uniquely identify individual atoms in a crystal and see how those atoms bond to one another. And in living color.

With reasonable assumptions, it is possible to estimate the number of atoms in one's body that originated from within William Shakespeare. There are three sources of Shakespearean atoms: (i) those produced at the time of his death, (ii) those breathed out during his lifetime and (iii) and those that exited in the form of solid, liquid and gaseous waste (Please avoid imaginative thought here) while he was alive. It turns out that source (i) is considerably smaller than sources (ii) and (iii).

I remember thinking as a young kid, ever since learning of the law of conservation of matter, that we must all be breathing in dinosaur crap.