About a recent paper from my lab: B. H. Schlomann and R. Parthasarathy, “Gut bacterial aggregates as living gels,” eLife, 10: e71105 (2021). DOI: 10.7554/eLife.71105. What do gut bacterial colonies look like? My group has been exploring this question for years, and ever since our first forays peering inside larval zebrafish it has been evident … Continue reading Living Gels
Before my memories grow even dimmer I should write down some thoughts about the class I taught Spring term: The Physics of Solar and Renewable Energies. Like its companion course, The Physics of Energy and the Environment, which I taught the quarter before and wrote about here, it’s a course for non-science-major undergraduates at the … Continue reading Course Recap: Physics of Solar and Renewable Energies, Spring 2021
When I graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1997, non-California-residents made up about 10% of the undergraduate population [1]; the fraction now is 25% [2]. Here at the University of Oregon (UO), also a public university, out-of-state undergraduates are 44% of the student body. Why have these numbers increased so much at … Continue reading Graphs about out-of-state college students and money
There’s almost nothing new in this post, but descriptions of my upcoming (early 2022) general-audience book on biophysics are scattered across multiple blog posts, in some cases with outdated information like old versions of the title. Since it’s useful to have one definitive post to point to, here it is. So Simple a Beginning: How … Continue reading “So Simple A Beginning,” A Popular Science Book about Biophysics
Update June 18, 2021: A preprint of my article is here. Over a year ago, I was invited to write a “resource letter” on Biological Physics for the American Journal of Physics, a very good education-focused journal. The goal of its resource letters is to provide a collection of books, articles, and other resources that … Continue reading Welcome to Biophysics! — A “Resource Letter”
In the quarter that recently ended I taught The Physics of Energy and the Environment, a course for non-science-major undergraduates at the University of Oregon (UO) that I’ve taught before, though never before as an online, Zoom-based course. (For those reading this in the far-off future: It’s April 2021, and we’re a bit over a … Continue reading Course Recap: Physics of Energy and the Environment, Winter 2021
Last week, I gave the final exam for my Physics of Energy and the Environment class, a course for non-science-major undergraduates. Nearly all of the questions were answered correctly by a majority of students, and the individual question outcomes correlated well with overall exam performance. Surprisingly, however, there was one question that the vast majority … Continue reading A Puzzle about Paris and Climate
About a paper from my lab [1] on competition and cooperation among gut microbes. Is the whole more than the sum of its parts? This question arises throughout the sciences, as one wonders whether understanding the constituents of some system suffices to understand the system as a whole. Sometimes the answer is “yes.” Electromagnetic fields, … Continue reading Tossing Starfish from the Tidepools — Gut Microbiome Edition
I’ve hit “send” on the final manuscript files for my popular science book on biophysics. The last round of revisions and edits took all the time I could spare over the past three months, and lots of time that I couldn’t! I should write a new, up to date summary of the book, but this … Continue reading Pop-Science Biophysics, now with a title!
It’s again time for The Year in Books! (Previous posts: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015.) 2020 was challenging in many ways. One consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic was the difficulty of getting books, very minor of course compared to many misfortunes both personal and global, but annoying nonetheless. The Eugene Public Library has been … Continue reading The Year in Books, 2020
