A few weeks ago, I came across a fascinating review article in Science with the instantly compelling title, Poor human olfaction is a 19th-century myth [1]. Like most people, I’ve been told that compared to many other animals, humans aren’t very good at smelling. Apparently this isn’t true, and stems more from 19th century notions of … Continue reading You smell fine
The problem This term I’m teaching The Physics of Energy and the Environment. A few weeks ago, I flew to France for a 3-day meeting. Obviously, there is a tension between these statements. How can I reconcile them, not only to counter the (ostensible) hypocrisy of caring about climate change while contributing more to it … Continue reading Climate change, travel, and teaching
Why is science communication difficult? For subjects like vaccination, climate change, genetic modification, and more, there are rifts between the views of scientists and the views of large segments of the US population, rifts that seem driven not only by a lack of understanding of scientific concepts, but also by a lack of understanding of … Continue reading Fight the power (pose)
How can we describe a population expanding into a new environment, like an invasive species spreading into virgin territory, or a disease infiltrating a community of susceptible hosts? Would the speed at which the population’s front advances be constant, like a car driving along a highway, so that if it travels 60 miles in one … Continue reading Muskrats, Arts and Crafts
Synopsis: (1) We’re posting preprints, for the reasons that you’re probably already familiar with. (2) I can entertain myself by making graphs and models, this time about article metrics. Preprints A few months ago we posted our first, and a few weeks ago our second, papers on bioRxiv, the fairly new preprint server for life … Continue reading We’re Hip, We’re Trendy, We’re Pre-printers
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 long post, in which you’ll have to slog or scroll through several paragraphs to get to the real question: can we navigate using fallen sticks? These days we seem to be inundated with deeply flawed scientific papers, often featuring shaky conclusions boldly drawn from noisy data, results that can’t be replicated, or both. I … Continue reading On the replication crisis in science and the twigs in my backyard
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
The Eighteenth Elephant 