We’ve all seen ants carrying seeds, crumbs, other insects — things whose mass is a good fraction of their own. Most of us couldn’t lift things that are so heavy relative to ourselves, and so ants and many other tiny creatures have reputations for being strong. Is this justified? Answering this question brings up the … Continue reading Are Ants Really So Strong? — What is biophysics? #5
Occasionally, things go exactly as I’d hoped. We’re discussing scaling in my Physics of Life class, starting with things like the scaling of volume and area with size. I mentioned in passing that this issue comes up in advertising, and since students seemed interested, I brought the following to the next class — an interactive … Continue reading How to lie with scaling
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
On some days, being a physics professor is a real slog — many-hour meetings, struggles with grant funding, endless emails, and near-futile attempts to eke out time for actually thinking about science. But there are other days in which it’s really awesome. Today, for example, I got to cart around an elephant femur. Here it … Continue reading Then we played bones, and I’m yelling domino
The Eighteenth Elephant 