In Part 1, I described the motivations behind a “Freshman Interest Group” (FIG) seminar I taught last term, called “Modeling Life,” that explored how contemporary science can make sense of biology by way of physical and computational models. I also wrote about several of the topics explored in the class. Here, I’ll describe some of … Continue reading Modeling Life (a freshman seminar) — Part 2
I’ll finish a “real” post soon: Part 2 of my recap of a freshman seminar course on models. (I made the painting for it already!) But, since I’ve written about funding issues in science before (e.g. here), I can’t resist a small post on a proposed new NIH funding program. There is, of course, a … Continue reading Notice how I’m transferring knowledge, for free
Last term I taught a small freshman seminar called “Modeling Life,” on ways of looking at biology through the lens of physical and computational models. It was part of the university’s “Freshman Interest Group” (FIG) program, in which one creates small seminars that connect two regular courses that each student in the FIG takes. This … Continue reading Modeling Life (a freshman seminar) — Part 1
Correction Jan. 2, 2014: My ‘received email’ count was actually the sum of the number of sent and received emails. (My ‘sent’ folders are inside my local received folders, hence the double-counting.) I’ve fixed the numbers and graphs. I’m far from the first person to note that emails are an incessant and almost overwhelming burden. … Continue reading Jetpacks? No. Flying cars? No. Thousands and thousands of emails? Yes. That’s 2014.
This post is really just an update to the last one, on our recent paper on watching the growth of gut bacterial communities, but I thought I’d post separately that I just learned that we made the cover of mBio. (Or more accurately, the illustration I submitted is the “featured image” for this issue — … Continue reading A bacterial clock
(I wrote a shorter version of this post for the META Center blog, here.) A large fraction of my research group’s efforts are devoted to understanding the structure and dynamics of gut microbial communities — the multitude of microbes that we, like all animals, house in our digestive tracts. Our approach is a very direct … Continue reading Glimpses of Gut Microbes
As of yesterday, the graduate student union here at the University of Oregon is on strike*. (I walked past three separate picket lines on my way to get coffee.) I don’t have anything profound to write about labor issues, but I thought I should post something that’s graduate-student-related! Quite often, the topic of “time to … Continue reading Universality, Scaling, and Time-to-Ph.D.
In my last post I wrote about the enormous bacterium Epulopiscium, and how it addresses the limitations of Brownian motion. Seeing this, Alex Small sent me a fascinating paper from a few years ago that I hadn’t seen before: “The energetics of genome complexity,” (Nick Lane and William Martin, Nature 467: 929 (2010)) [ungated PDF]. (Thanks, … Continue reading Where are the star-shaped bacteria?
One of the reasons I went into Physics is the absoluteness of its claims: every proton has an electric charge; every bit of mass generates a gravitational field; and so on. One of the dizzying yet fascinating things about biology is, often, its lack of universality — nearly every statement one can make has some … Continue reading Giant germs, making a mockery of physics
Occasionally, things go exactly as I’d hoped. We’re discussing scaling in my Physics of Life class, starting with things like the scaling of volume and area with size. I mentioned in passing that this issue comes up in advertising, and since students seemed interested, I brought the following to the next class — an interactive … Continue reading How to lie with scaling
The Eighteenth Elephant 