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
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
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
I was thrilled yesterday morning to learn that super-resolution microscopy is the subject of a Nobel Prize this year. (Or more accurately, that Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell, and William E. Moerner were awarded the Nobel Prize “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy.”) Super-resolution microscopy is wonderful, as I’ve written before. In all its various … Continue reading The 2014 Nobel Prizes: Switched at Birth?
For a while I’ve thought I should write up a paper on my biophysics-for-non-science-majors course, just to document what its motivations are and how I’ve approached teaching it, in case it helps spur others to create similar courses. I’ve finally done this; a pre-print is on arXiv here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.0666 (“The Physics of Life,” an undergraduate … Continue reading Preprint: “The Physics of Life”
As in each of the past six years, I co-organized a Physics + Human Physiology day camp for 11th graders for a week in July, in which we explored wide swathes of science and also learned a bit about how college works. (It’s part of the SAIL umbrella of camps — see here and here.) … Continue reading The ice cream and the dead people
Continuing my trend of belatedly writing short descriptions of papers my group has published, this one came out in May, describing a new approach we developed for measuring the viscosity of lipid membranes: “Measuring Lipid Membrane Viscosity Using Rotational and Translational Probe Diffusion,” Tristan T. Hormel, Sarah Q. Kurihara, M. Kathleen Brennan, Matthew C. Wozniak, … Continue reading Viscosity in two dimensions
As mentioned a few weeks ago, a highlight of teaching this term was bringing in an elephant femur and a dog femur, to highlight the lack of simple proportionality between them. (The elephant’s femur is about 10 times as long as the dog’s, and 20 times wider.) Coincidentally, just a few days after this, researchers … Continue reading Next year, I’ll need a bigger cart
The Eighteenth Elephant 