About a recent paper on biological light emission. Do you emit light? The naive answer is no. None of us light up a room as we enter, other than perhaps metaphorically. The intermediate level answer, familiar to undergraduate physics majors, is yes — not by virtue of being alive but because of fundamental thermodynamics: everything … Continue reading The Bright Side of Life (Literally)
About a recent paper from my lab: Julia S Ngo, Piyush Amitabh, Jonah G Sokoloff, Calvin Trinh, Travis J Wiles, Karen Guillemin, and Raghuveer Parthasarathy, “The Vibrio Type VI Secretion System Induces Intestinal Macrophage Redistribution and Enhanced Intestinal Motility,” mBio, (2024). A few years ago, my lab discovered that Vibrio cholerae, the bacteria that cause … Continue reading A gut-wrenching tale of bacteria and immune cells
I’m always interested to hear who won the latest Physics Nobel Prize, and today’s announcement was particularly exciting: John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” Is it surprising? Is it controversial? Apparently yes. I predicted Hopfield in response to a friend’s poll a few … Continue reading The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics — Yes, Physics!
Insulin is an abomination. Sure, injecting it saves the lives of millions of diabetics, but that injected protein is unnatural and abhorrent, the product of a genetically modified organism! And it’s not even necessary: Rather than playing God to coax single-celled creatures never designed for insulin production to make the stuff, we could be harvesting … Continue reading Insulin is an abomination: Recent bad news about food
This past term I taught my “Biophysics for non-science majors” course, actually called “The Physics of Life,” for the first time since 2018, and, more notably, for the first time since writing my pop-science book, So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World (blog post; Amazon) — published in 2022 (and … Continue reading Course recap: “The Physics of Life” Winter 2024
Usually when I write about biophysics, it’s with the uplifting message that understanding physics helps us make sense of biology, bringing varied phenomena together under umbrellas of general principles. This is true, and there are countless examples. Brownian motion explains the meandering of neurotransmitters and the patterning of embryonic body segments. Electrical interactions influence the … Continue reading Enhance Your Productivity by Ignoring Biophysics
Several times so far I’ve taught a graduate course on biophysics. Last term I taught it again, but with a twist: it was a combined graduate and undergraduate course. There were two motivations for this. First, biophysics is unfamiliar enough to physics graduate students that upper-division undergraduates aren’t at any significant disadvantage. In fact, I’ve … Continue reading Recap of a Graduate (and Undergraduate!) Biological Physics Course
Each of us has a genome of about 3 billion DNA nucleotides — a sequence of 3 billion As, Cs, Gs, and Ts. Knowing what this sequence is, whether our own sequence or that of a bacterium, a barley plant, a baboon, or anything else, tells us about the repertoire of tools its genome encodes, … Continue reading How did we make reading genomes a million times cheaper? — What is biophysics? #18
Perhaps when blowing your nose, or the nose of a sick child, you’ve wondered where all this stuff comes from. How can one nose make so much mucus? This is #17 in our series of biophysical questions (#1, #16). The answer involves electrical forces and the physical character of mucus. Mucus, the gooey liquid secreted … Continue reading How can one nose make so much mucus? — What is biophysics? #17
Viruses encode their genomes in RNA or DNA, which they pack into a tiny space. For example, Varicella zoster, the virus that causes chickenpox and shingles, stuffs a double-stranded DNA molecule about 40,000 nm in length into a shell about 200 nm in diameter. This is even more impressive than it may seem because DNA … Continue reading Can viruses explode? — What is biophysics? #16
The Eighteenth Elephant 