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
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”
…0.004 ! There is, these days, no shortage of metrics for quantifying scientists’ impact. Aside from simple counts of citations (i.e. how many times one’s research papers are cited by other papers), there’s the now ubiquitous h-index [1] that combines the number of papers one has published and the citations per paper, as well as … Continue reading My Kardashian index is…
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
This week’s Economist has a fascinating map of the number of UFO sightings per capita, by state: When I saw this last Friday, it raised a few questions: What’s up with Washington? How well do UFO reports correlate with population density? (Do aliens have a fondness for sparsely settled, wide-open spaces?) Could I use any … Continue reading Sasquatch is an alien! (A proof in three graphs)
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
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 