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”
I came across recently (via [1]) a neat interactive graph from the US census bureau illustrating the career paths that STEM majors take: One can click on particular categories of majors, revealing for example that more than half of engineering majors end up doing engineering, but that only about a tenth of physical science majors … Continue reading Branching STEMs
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
…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
Like last year, several of us from the Physics Department manned a booth at the Oregon Country Fair, the long-running hippie / arts / music / performance / counterculture festival that occurs each year outside Eugene. I worked there today, which was lots of fun. Though our booth was mostly about energy — lots of … Continue reading “You should do birthday parties!” — Year 2 at the Oregon Country Fair
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)
Appallingly, the University of California system has just prohibited its employees from using AirBnB (and other peer-to-peer services) for business-related travel [link: Inside Higher Ed]. I’ve become a big fan of AirBnB [wikipedia]. For those unaware of it, it links people with rooms or apartments or houses to briefly rent out with people looking for … Continue reading UC vs. AirBnB
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 