I spent the past week at a fascinating conference on teaching at the interface of physics and biology: a mix of biophysics research talks, education talks, and combinations of the two. I presented a poster on my ‘biophysics for non-science majors’ course, which went over well. Perhaps its biggest impact was superficial, though: everyone (including … Continue reading A soft, silky, scientific poster
In general, there’s little or no correlation between the length of a eukaryotic organism’s genome and any other “obvious” characteristics, such as the creature’s overall size. Humans have a genome of about 3.4 billion base pairs; those of mice and giraffes are a bit smaller (2.7 billion base pairs), for example, and orangutans’ and guinea … Continue reading The creation of the birds
Several sources have pointed me to this neat web site of spurious correlations, showing graphically how, for example, the age of Miss America correlates with the number of murders by steam, hot vapours and hot objects, or my favorite: Though spurious correlations can be dangerous (and hilarious), it’s often useful to look for correlations in … Continue reading Reading this post? You get an “A”!
My older son’s school (Willagillespie Elementary) had its annual “Math and Science Night” tonight, which is consistently great. This year, I was asked if I would do something for it, and I decided to present some demonstrations and activities about surface tension. Here’s something that I didn’t show, but that I did for my Physics … Continue reading Water magic
On some days, being a physics professor is a real slog — many-hour meetings, struggles with grant funding, endless emails, and near-futile attempts to eke out time for actually thinking about science. But there are other days in which it’s really awesome. Today, for example, I got to cart around an elephant femur. Here it … Continue reading Then we played bones, and I’m yelling domino
Our Physics Department Colloquium this week is on a topic I’m fond of: the analysis of super-resolution microscopy images. This occurrence isn’t surprising, since I invited the speaker, Alex Small, with whom I co-wrote a recent review paper on the subject. The problem that superresolution microscopy confronts is that it’s hard to see tiny things. … Continue reading I should think of a title involving the words “Small” and “Microscopy”
How does a department recruit graduate students? Like many physics departments, ours brings accepted prospective students to visit, funneling most of them into two days during which we try to convey information about our research, the university, the area, etc. Faculty in different research areas think of ways to spend an hour or so describing … Continue reading Grabbing graduate students with graphs
I’ve been reading bits and pieces of Geometry of Design, by Kimberly Elam, which I found randomly on a shelf in our Art and Architecture library. The book has many great examples of design and composition, and thoughts on the wonders of golden rectangles, pentagrams, and other shapes. It devotes a few pages to this … Continue reading Konstructing a poster
How much does a graduate student cost? Short answer: close to $60k per year. Long answer: Several times in the past few weeks, the topic of graduate student cost has come up. The “real” cost of a graduate student in the sciences, i.e. the money that a grant has to provide to support a graduate … Continue reading The $60,000 graduate student
I came across a short article at Science’s news site that notes that “Up to 1000 NIH Investigators Dropped Out Last Year” — i.e. the number of investigators funded by the NIH is presently dropping, a likely consequence of shrinking funding. The article includes this graph: What I find striking about the graph is the … Continue reading Culling the (science) herd?
The Eighteenth Elephant 