[Temporary announcement: I’m giving a virtual book talk Tuesday, Nov 29! Link] Many living things move. Panthers pounce, snakes slither, dolphins dive. Organs can move (such as beating hearts), and even individual cells can be motile, such as the immune cells that crawl through our tissues. How far down in scale we can go and … Continue reading Can a Molecule Walk? — What is biophysics? #12
This was supposed to be a short, simple post about how brittle stars use their skeletons to help them see. It turns out, however, that the brittle stars have misled us, and what we thought we knew twenty years ago has been overturned by new observations. The question of what and how various creatures see … Continue reading Do Sea Stars See? — What is biophysics? #11
Four years ago, I read Bryan Caplan’s The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, a polemic about the form of education in the U.S. I disagreed strongly with a decent fraction of it, agreed strongly with a larger fraction of it, and overall found it stimulating — … Continue reading The Case For, and the Case Against, “The Case Against Education”
About a recent paper from my lab: Deepika Sundarraman, T. Jarrod Smith, Jade V. Z. Kast, Karen Guillemin, and Raghuveer Parthasarathy, “Disaggregation as an interaction mechanism among intestinal bacteria,” Biophysical Journal (2022). Some bacteria stick together; others do not. We have seen these variations among bacteria inside the zebrafish gut, and it’s probably the case … Continue reading Things Fall Apart; The Bacterial Cluster Cannot Hold
Your genome is the totality of your genetic instructions, embodied in your DNA, of which each cell carries a copy. (Two copies, but let’s ignore that.) How big is your genome? Often, the answer is given in terms of base pairs — the rungs of the ladder of double-stranded DNA. For humans, it’s 3 billion … Continue reading How Big Is Your Genome? — What is biophysics? #10
On his blog today, Andrew Gelman posted a simple to state, clearly realistic, and surprisingly deep statistics puzzle sent to him by Ariel Rubinstein and Michele Piccione, from their paper, “Real People Aggregating Signals: An Experiment and a Short Story” Article Link: A very small proportion of the newborns in a certain country have a … Continue reading Three views of a statistics puzzle
In a charming letter published in 1774, Benjamin Franklin described an experiment in which he had poured “not more than a teaspoonful” of oil onto a pond, which he found sufficient to calm the water despite a choppy wind. What, you may be wondering, connects Franklin, ponds, tears, and salad dressing? In the last “What … Continue reading How are tears like salad dressing? — What is biophysics? #9
You’re full of amazing liquids. How can a liquid be amazing? One way is to have properties that change depending on how strongly the liquid is pushed. The speed at which a fluid flows depends on the force that’s driving it, and the proportionality between force and flow is known as the viscosity of the … Continue reading How are tears like ketchup? — What is biophysics? #8
No. Nor are atoms, viruses, or grains of sand. It is a fundamental truth that everything is in motion, shaking, twisting, and turning at random with an intensity that depends on temperature, motionless only at the unattainable limit of absolute zero. Though this is a manifestation of physics, its consequences for biology are profound and … Continue reading Are molecules ever still? — What is biophysics? #7
I regularly teach classes on energy, environment, climate, etc., for non-science major undergraduates at the University of Oregon. Inspired by some blog comments elsewhere, I thought I’d list list some books on this subject that I like. It’s especially worth noting books aimed at the general, non-specialist reader that are nonetheless quantitative. I firmly believe … Continue reading Books I Like about Energy, Climate, and Civilization
The Eighteenth Elephant 