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
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”
This week’s bad graph* plots three-dimensional data with a squashed perspective, hiding any scatter of the points along the “out of plane” axis: The cognoscenti will recognize the plot as visualizing the outcome of principal component analysis (PCA), in this case applied to the microbial communities in mice fed dust from homes** with dogs (D) … Continue reading Bad Graph of the Week (in 3D!)
I’ll conclude a three-part series of posts on useful or interesting readings in biophysics with the shortest list: popular science books. I’ve often thought it unfortunate that there aren’t more books for the general public on biophysics. The physics underlying the squeezing of DNA into viruses, the crawling through tissues of patrolling immune cells, the … Continue reading Readings in Biophysics, part III (Popular Science)
I was delighted to hear that this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to James Rothman, Randy Schekman and Thomas Südhof for uncovering the molecular machineries that govern cargo trafficking in cells. Trafficking is a fascinating and hugely important topic, and it’s one that has influenced my own work as well. For a … Continue reading Vesicle Trafficking, and the Nobel Prize
Whales, apparently, learn from one another. That’s the message of this paper in Science last month on the transmission of feeding tactics among humpback whales. There are lots of fascinating things in the article, some of which are news to me but have been known for a long time to people who pay attention to … Continue reading Whales, culture, and graphs
The Eighteenth Elephant 