I was sad to learn that Steven Vogel passed away yesterday. He was a giant in the field of biomechanics, and his books on the subject are brilliant, fascinating, and fun. I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve run into who, like me, have found these books deeply inspirational. The first one I read … Continue reading In memoriam: Steven Vogel
I’m a bit behind in writing summaries of recently published papers from my group. Here’s one that’s a few months old — I’m spurred to write now since I just learned two days ago that it got onto the cover of JACS, the flagship journal of the American Chemical Society: M. D. Hammers, M. J. … Continue reading Seeing the smell of rotten eggs
A recent article in Physical Review Letters reports on “self-propelled droplet removal” from fibers — the authors designed hydrophobic fibers with the property that when water droplets grow and coalesce on them, the energy released by the coalescence flings the drops off the fibers. The underlying phenomenon is one we’ve all seen: two water droplets, … Continue reading On fungi and fabrics
In my last post, I wrote about a remarkable recent paper reporting that C. elegans, the well-studied nematode worm, can sense magnetic fields. In a series of elegant experiments, researchers at UT Austin showed that C. elegans moves at a particular preferred angle to an applied field. Moreover, that angle matches the angle between the … Continue reading On second thought, don’t ask worms for directions
It’s great to find a scientific paper that reports something really new — something interesting whose very existence as a substance or behavior or phenomenon was unexpected. It’s doubly great if the paper itself is clear, thorough, and convincing. And it’s almost too much to ask, in addition, for for the topic to be biophysical … Continue reading Worm Positioning Systems
(A more technical post than most, in which we look at bacterial population densities, and watch a movie.) This term I taught a graduate biophysics course, about which I’ll write a recap later. Bacteria came up a lot in the course, both because they’re important but also because they offer many nice illustrations of how … Continue reading Bacteria and Boltzmann
I was a participant (contestant?) in our local “Physics Slam” two weeks ago, in which half a dozen physics faculty gave 10 minute talks to the general public, with a “winner” chosen by about five judges selected from the audience. About 500 people came, filling an auditorium: My talk, Why do bacteria care about physics?, … Continue reading Slammed! (Why do bacteria care about physics?)
Next term, I’ll be teaching a brand-new graduate biophysics course. (It’s the first time teaching a graduate course in my eight years as a professor!) I’ve spent quite a while thinking of what should be in it and how the course should be structured. Here, I’ll just note my list of topics (below, with a … Continue reading T-minus 9 days for my graduate biophysics course
I’m at a conference at Biosphere 2, the large ecological research facility in the Arizona desert that was originally launched as an attempt at creating a sealed, self-contained ecosystem. It’s a surreal place — a collection of glass pyramids and domes housing miniature rain forests, deserts, an “ocean,” and a few other biomes — that’s … Continue reading Mini-Geo-Engineering
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
The Eighteenth Elephant 