Kid is growing, lack of sleep makes euphoric, but less time is less time;-)
The 2010 impact factors were just released by Thomson Reuters, 
as most of you will know due to the mails sent by almost all publishers to tell about recent boosts of impact for their journals. A sober post was written by Jörg Heber, editor of Nature materials. A brief quote
So what use is the impact factor number? Well, being cynical one could say it is a quick measure for those that don’t read the journals but still want to know how good they are on average. The danger is of course that this is then used as a kind of metric to assess the quality of research or to decide on the career of researchers.
Maybe not so surprisingly, the recent Nature material’s editorial is about the impact factor as well. It also includes a link to Eigenfactor, which is open and also weights from how “good” a journal the reference to the measured publication was made. There, only the 2009 results are up presently.
Concerning organic photovoltaics, the race for higher efficiencies briefly had seemed to have taken another step upwards as compared to the recent non-certified above 9% power conversion efficiency to almost 12%, but I heard that this was a mistake. New competition for organics comes from a startup Alta devices, which makes solar cells of GaAs by epitaxial liftoff to reduce cost. Does not sound so cost effective, but if they go on to prove it, it’s ertainly impressive with the above 28% efficiency shown by them recently, as reported by Technology Review. Along these lines, flexible CIGS solar cells have hit 18.7% end of May by the EMPA researchers around Prof. Tiwari. Indium price may be a limiting factor here, but otherwise this thin film polycrystalline technique is another strong competitor. Thus, enough driving force to go bexond 10% for organic solar cells soon:-)
Finally, a nonphysical, but nevertheless important read: Traumatic brain injuries in illustrated literature: experience from a series of over 700 head injuries in the Asterix comic books – enjoy ;-) Thanks to Julien for the hint.
With that, bye for now. Next entry will not be a news summary, I hope, but something more physics related again…
Notes on Disordered Matter 