The Unseen Impact of Physics In Healthcare

This is a nice news article that provides a basic summary of the applications of physics in healthcare and medicine. It's another one of those where if someone thinks physics only deals with esoteric and useless ideas, show him/her this. I've mentioned many examples of similar medical/health/etc. applications and concepts that came directly from physics, such as this one.

As someone who often teaches general physics to life science/premed/bio/kinesiology major, this is definitely another useful evidence to get them to realize that the physics class they are taking has a direct relevance to their area of study.

Zz.

Solid State Sensors To Detect COVID Virus?

First of all, I'm not sure why this is called "Quantum sensor". Maybe it is because it is using solid-state physics principles?

This is an interesting report, and if the simulation is valid, I'm hoping that such devices will be made real soon because it has the ability to detect other types of viruses. It really is a solid state sensor that makes use of solid state physics principles.

In the presence of viral RNA, these pairs will detach from the nanodiamond surface thanks to a process called c-DNA and virus RNA hybridization. The newly formed c-DNA-Gd³⁺/RNA compound will then freely diffuse in solution, thereby increasing the distance between the magnetic Gd and the nanodiamond. As a result of this increased distance, the NV centres will sense less magnetic “noise” and thus have a longer T₁ time, which manifests itself in a larger fluorescence intensity.

By optically monitoring the change in relaxation time using a laser-based sensor, the researchers say they could identify the presence of viral RNA in a sample and even quantify the number of RNA molecules. Indeed, according to their simulations, Cappellaro, Kohandel and colleagues, who report their work in Nano Letters, say that their technique could detect as few as a few hundred strands of viral RNA and boast an FNR of less than 1%, which is much lower than RT-PCR even without the RNA amplification step. The device could also be scaled up so that it could measure many samples at once and could detect RNA viruses other than SARS-CoV-2, they add.

I find this interesting because as students in solid-state physics, one of the first thing that the students encounter in such a course is the study of solid-state crystal lattice. This includes the type of defects in a crystal lattice, such as vacancies and impurities. So this diamond NV center is exactly those two types of defect in the lattice. Imagine that something you learned during the first couple of weeks of a course in school actually has a humongous application to human well-being!

Chalk this one up as another invaluable application from condensed matter physics.

Zz.

10 Scientfic Evidence In Support Of Airborne Transmission of SAR-CoV-2 Virus

The ridiculous battle during the pandemic on wearing masks, social distancing, and other restrictions reveals the lack of understanding among many in the general public on how science works, on what is considered as valid scientific evidence, and how our knowledge progresses as more and more evidence and data accumulates. I continue to be amazed at the reasons why some people still resist wearing proper face masks. I can understand if they find it uncomfortable (who does?) and that it is inconvenient (who thinks otherwise?). However, if the reason given is that masks doesn't do anything or isn't effective in reducing the chances of the virus being spread, then I want evidence to back that up.

This is where the public lack the understanding of (i) the nature of valid, scientific evidence, versus simply something you read on Facebook, news websites, or even from talking heads on TV, (ii) where to find such evidence or what should you pay more serious attention to versus those other sources that I mentioned. Here, I want to contrast the type of information that is contained in a scientific paper versus what you find in news article or many public online websites.

(1) When you read something in the news on a typical mass media source, you are told the content, but very seldom are you given proper, exact citation. At best, the type of citation that would be mentioned would be something to the effect that this was published in such-and-such journal or book, etc. Worse still, often times the sources are not even cited, so many of these things are stated as if they are facts, and facts that many of us are unable to verify on our own, if we wish to.

In contrast, scientific publications require exact citation. If you say that this result is in agreement or support by recent discoveries, you must give bibliographical references to those sources, i.e. name of author/s, name of journal where it was published, what page/volume number, date it was published, etc. These details are crucial in someone else verifying the sources of the claim. This is what is often missing in many general public articles, and unfortunately, this is often the source of Fake News, because exact evidence and sources to back the claims are either bogus, unreported, or unrevealed, which prevented anyone from double-checking their validity.

(2) News report and online articles often ignore contradicting evidence. When someone claims that he/she got sick after receiving a vaccine shot, why doesn't he/she consider why a lot of other people didn't get sick? Of if receiving a vaccine shot makes one "magnetic", how come other people aren't? This can also be applied to a lot of "news" programs that reports on certain occurrences that was due to something, but ignore other instances where those occurrences do not happen.

In scientific papers, this is a no-no. In fact, as a referee for several physics journals, I often will check if the authors are ignoring contradicting experimental evidence, or other papers that may be in the opposite to what the authors observed or claiming. These contradictions MUST BE ADDRESSED, i.e. they are not swept under the carpet or just ignored. And they must be addressed in terms of scientific reason, not simply by claiming that the contradicting results were made by Democrats, Republicans, Muslims, Jews, liberals, conservatives, etc. Look at how many so-called discussions or reports attached labels as a means to dismiss something. Such flimsy tactics do not wash in scientific papers.

(3) General public articles and news lacks details and clarity. I read a news article last year where a family decided to go to Walt Disney World in Orlando, FL, and when they got home, they tested positive for COVID-19 and immediately blamed their presence at the theme park for being infected. The news article didn't mentioned any other details about their trip. It did not say if they took a plane, didn't not say how long they stayed, whether they only went to the Disney theme park or did they also went elsewhere, and if they drove there, did they stop anywhere along the way, etc. There was a huge amount of information here that was missing even for a casual reader to be able to clearly analyze the validity of what the family was claiming.

If this claim is to be analyzed scientifically, then an epidemiologist would need to do really detailed tracing of every activity that the family did. Casual and speculative connection between A and B are usually insufficient to draw up valid conclusions.

In a scientific publication, every detailed of a calculation, every detail of the experiment, and every detail of how the analysis was done, must be clearly revealed. Often times, the experimental setup and equipment may had already been published elsewhere, and those will be cited as a reference. Similarly with the calculation and analysis. These details allow for an independent investigator to not only double-check what was done, but also to duplicate the experiment if necessary to see if the results are reproducible, which is a pillar of all scientific experiments (and why the Fleishmann and Pons cold fusion claim failed).

(4) Scientific papers are permanently recorded. They are not like Twitter feed that can be deleted, or news article that may be difficult to find anymore, or Facebook postings that have disappeared. This allows for future citations by other papers, and allows for continuing evaluations, advancements, refinements, rebuttals, contradictions, etc. There is a clear paper trail of who said what and when, which means that it is hard to deny or lie about something, or claim that someone didn't say that or didn't do that.

The whole point in all of this is not to force you to read scientific papers. It is ridiculous to insist that because many of them are not easy to read and are written for other experts. Rather, it is to distinguish on the nature of the evidence, and that if something is backed by proper scientific sources, then the evidence has a greater degree of validity and support than something that someone just rattled off on a TV talk show or on some Facebook post. It is unfortunate that many people, especially politicians, give equal credence to someone testifying that their bodies became magnetized without bothering to invite an expert to debunk such silliness. It seems that whole topics in physics, biology, and physiology were ignored to give air to this craziness.

It is the inability to evaluate the validity of the so-called evidence is one of the fundamental reasons why we are in the state that we are in today.

"But ZapperZ, the topic is about the scientific evidence for airborne transmission of the COVID virus.  Where is it?", you asked.

Good question. I guess this is the long, circuital route to point you to this Lancet article that contains the evidence, and the references to the scientific papers, that support the claim. Compare the types of research that were done, the analysis that were performed, and how the conclusions were drawn, and compare that with the types of "evidence" presented in the popular media and TV news programs.

Have fun reading!

Zz.

Bringing Current News Into A Physics Lesson

I chat often with my colleagues from the English and other departments. I often envy them because many of their assignments have the ability to incorporate the hot topics of the day. They often assign tasks such as essay writing that involves subject matter that are relevant for the current times, such as writing about Black Lives Matter movement, the pandemic, etc.

While I always want to do the same, it is less obvious and not so straight-forward in bringing the same thing into a physics lesson. I had managed to incorporate some over the years (direct observation of blackhole in an IR image while we were studying EM waves as an example). But to incorporate topic-of-the-day to match the topic of the lesson is not that easy.

But this time, I managed to do it, and it was a doozy. We were about to dive into the topic of magnetism and electromagnetic field when I stumbled upon a goldmine. It is the claim that the COVID vaccine can cause one to become magnetized!

Now, my class is still being done remotely, so I make extensive use of the discussion forum as one means of student engagement. When the subject of magnetism comes up, the topic of discussion that I created was for the student to read a couple of news reports on this claim being made. The task is not to either belittle or make fun the claim or the people who made them. Rather, it is to rationally examine the claim and use well-established scientific facts to analyze the validity of such a claim. The students had to do this based on what they have learned about magnetic field, the type of magnetism in a material, and what type of materials are attracted to a magnet.

They were encouraged to make their own at-home observation. Everyone had refrigerator magnets, and I asked them to try and stick various items to the magnet, especially the ones that had been used in the testimony reported in the news article. A student also had the bright idea to use a compass that she had and see if the compass needle changes direction if she brought it against her skin (she's fully vaccinated) or her parents' skin. She cleverly argued that if something has a strong enough magnetic field to attract a spoon, it should cause a noticeable deflection in the compass needed.

This ended up being a lively discussion topic in the discussion forum, with students posting pictures, videos, etc. either one something they found, or something they did. It forced them to sift through what they read in the news to find the details that they can analyze and compare with what they learned about magnetism. They studied the validity of the claim only from the scientific point of view without passing any judgement on politics or personal beliefs.

The whole thing went better than I expected. The students were engaged because this was a current and relevant topic, and they get to see first hand how something that they just learned was actually useful enough to be used to analyze a news item. They get to see that a physics topic is not just something esoteric with little direct practical use in everyday life.

Oh, I should also mention that this is an algebra-based General Physics course that is tailored to life-science/pre-med/biology/kinesiology major. Many of the students are quite familiar with the human body and biological functions, so their discussion included several possible explanations on why something would or would not stick to a human skin without any consideration about magnetism.

It is on days like these that I get great joy in being a teacher.

Zz.

Intro Physics for Life Sciences

I came across this article out of Michigan State University, about the issue of teaching intro physics to life science majors. I find it rather interesting (amusing?) that this is still an issue being discussed at many large universities when smaller universities and community colleges have long focused on designing such courses for these life sciences/pre-med majors.

Without naming names, I know of 3 major universities in the Chicago area that do NOT have special intro physics courses for such majors. They lump them with the same group of students majoring in physics, chemistry and engineering. So not only are they required to know calculus in those calculus-based intro physics courses, but also they are competing with students whose major are more closely aligned with physics. It is why many of these life-science majors often opted to pay for these courses at city colleges and community colleges and get their transfer credits.

I had written something on this two years ago about teaching physics to life-science/pre-med majors. I am more convinced than ever, just as stated in the article, that you cannot teach this as you normally would to physical science/engineering students. It helps that the course was designed for life-science majors (we used text that are full of examples out of biology, medicine, etc.), but the course objectives and learning outcomes are generic and not specific to these majors. At the curriculum level, there is still a disconnect between the students' need and the official objectives of the course. As an instructor, I am bound by the course objectives and learning outcomes, but of course, I have leeway in implementing those. That means that I try to emphasize more on the topics that are more relevant to their needs and more applicable to life sciences than others. As the article pointed out, while planetary motion and central force problems are part of physics (and part of the course objectives), I do not emphasize it as much as I would in a calc-based physics class.

There can be more refinement and improvement in the design of courses for these students, making them even more relevant to their area of studies. This can only lead to a win-win situation, where the students will actually see the value and connection between physics and biology/medicine, and we can motivate the students more easily on the importance of physics in their fields. I see nothing wrong with that at all.

Zz.

Thirteen tips for engaging with physicists, as told by a biologist

This is a rather fun reading, and it has a bit of truth if we (physicists) do a bit of self-reflecting on how we operate.

I think I'm going to post the link to the LMS for the general physics course I'll be teaching this Spring for Life Science/Pre-Med majors. 😄

And then there's a reverse flow, where you get 12 tips for engaging with biologist, as told by a physicist. Even a lot more self-reflection there!

In the end, biologists and physicists gain a lot from talking to each other.

And oh, Happy New Decade, btw!

Zz.

Human Eye Can Detect Cosmic Radiation

Well, not in the way you think.

I recently found this video of an appearance of astronaut Scott Kelly on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. During this segment, he talked about the fact that when he went to sleep on the Space Station and closed his eyes, he occasionally detected flashes of light. He attributed it to the cosmic radiation  passing through his body, and his eyes in particular.

Check out the video at minute 3:30



My first inclination is to say that this is similar to how we detect neutrinos, i.e. the radiation particles interact with the medium in his yes, either the vitreous or the medium that makes up the lens, and this interaction causes the ejection of relativistic electron and subsequently, a Cerenkov radiation. The Cerenkov radiation is then detected by the eye.

Of course, there are other possibilities, such as the cosmic particle causes an excitation of an atom or molecules when they collided, and this then caused a light emission. But Scott Kelly mentioned that these flashes appeared like fireworks. So my guess here is that it is more of a very short cascade of events, and probably the Cerenkov light scenario.

This, BTW, is almost how we detect neutrinos, especially at Super Kamiokande and all the neutrino detectors around the world. Neutrinos come into the detector, and those that interact with the medium inside the detector (water, for example), cause the emission of relativistic electrons that move faster than the speed of light inside the medium. This creates the Cerenkov radiation, and typically, the light is blueish white. It's the same glow that you see if you look in a pool of fuel rods in a nuclear reactor.

So there! You can detect something with your eyes closed!

Zz.

Teaching Intro Physics To Life Science Students

Teaching intro General Physics to Life Science/Bio students is something I do regularly. And it can be quite challenging because, in my case, calculus is not required and isn't used in the lesson. So there are many things that can't be easily derived from scratch.

I've resolved, a long time ago, that the approach to teaching such a class has to be different than the approach to teaching the calculus-based class, which is often populated by physics, chemistry, and engineering majors. In my experience, the average math skill is lower in the non-calc-based general physics class, which isn't too surprising. But more challenging than that, there is less of an interest and inclination towards the physics subject from such students. Most, if not all, of the Life Science/Bio students are in the class because they have to, and some even have an active dislike of the subject matter.

So it is definitely a challenge to not only convey the material in an understandable manner, but also to perk up their interest in the material so that they will do well in the course. It is why I tend to read papers like this one, which studied the correlation between life science students' interest, attitudes, and performance in a general physics class.[1] In particular, I'm always interested in using examples from biology/medicine to illustrate the particular physics topics that we cover in a lecture. As concluded in this paper, tailoring the subject matter to overlap with what the students are majoring in can affect not only the interest in the subject, but also their performance. This is a no-brainer for many of us, but this paper clearly shows the correlation.

BTW, it helps if the text being used is also geared towards the life science students.  The one that I had used before is "College Physics" by Giambattista, Richardson, and Richardson. I like the part where at the beginning of each chapter, it lists out some of the relevant applications in biology, medicine, etc. I just wish that the text has more examples from such areas, and more homework exercises in those areas, the way the paper described the examples and problems that were used in the course.

Zz.

[1] C.H. Crouch et al. Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. v.14, 010111 (2018).

Is QM About To Revolutionize Biochemistry?

It is an intriguing thought, and if these authors are correct, a bunch of chemical reactions, even at higher temperatures, may be explained via quantum indistinguishibility.

The worlds of chemistry and indistinguishable physics have long been thought of as entirely separate. Indistinguishability generally occurs at low temperatures while chemistry requires relatively high temperatures where objects tend to lose their quantum properties. As a result, chemists have long felt confident in ignoring the effects of quantum indistinguishability.

Today, Matthew Fisher and Leo Radzihovsky at the University of California, Santa Barbara, say that this confidence is misplaced. They show for the first time that quantum indistinguishability must play a significant role in some chemical processes even at ordinary temperatures. And they say this influence leads to an entirely new chemical phenomenon, such as isotope separation and could also explain a previously mysterious phenomenon such as the enhanced chemical activity of reactive oxygen species. 

They have uploaded their paper on arXiv.

Of course, this is still preliminary, but it provides the motivation to really explore this aspect that had not been seriously considered before. And with this latest addition, it is just another example on where physics, especially QM, are being further explored in biology and chemistry.

Zz.

The Laws Of Life

Physics Today has made the article "The Laws of Life" from the March 2017 issue available for free. In the article, astrobiologist Charles Cockell describes how the fundamental laws of physics influences the forms of life on Earth.

Zz.

Brain Region Responsible For Understanding Physics?

A group of researchers seem to think that they have found the region of the brain responsible for "understanding physics".

With both sets of experiments, the researchers found that when the subjects tried predicting physical outcomes, activity was most responsive in the premotor cortex and supplementary motor region of the brain: an area described as the brain’s action-planning region.

“Our findings suggest that physical intuition and action planning are intimately linked in the brain,” said Fischer. “We believe this might be because infants learn physics models of the world as they hone their motor skills, handling objects to learn how they behave. Also, to reach out and grab something in the right place with the right amount of force, we need real-time physical understanding.”

But is this really "understanding physics", though?

Zz.

Is There A Fundamental Difference In The Teaching of Physics and Chemistry/Biology?

I read in utter fascination of this opinion piece by Micheal McCracken. As you read this, pay attention not only to the fact that there appears to be a difference between how he perceived physics is taught at the undergraduate level, but also how the differences between the pedagogy of physics and chemistry/biology translates itself into how science is perceived by the public.

Abstract: During recent collaboration with colleagues to revise our institution's general-education curriculum, I encountered many perceptions of what we mean by the Natural Sciences. I was surprised to find that perceptions of scientific pedagogy varied significantly among the scientific disciplines, especially concerning issues of philosophy of science and epistemology, manifested in the approaches to teaching theoretical concepts and their development. These realizations suggest that Physics occupies a singular role in college curricula, introducing students, even at the introductory level, to the acquisition of knowledge by theoretical means and the assessment of theory based on experimental evidence.

His idea that fulfilling a student's requirement on learning Natural Science without taking physics and either chemistry or biology will be a serious deprivation on how science is done.

I tend to agree.

Zz.

Is There A Link Between Intelligence And Entropy?

It's an interesting question, and there are certainly models that point to such a link. The latest one is a very clear example the strong possibility that intelligence can be linked to entropy.

Entropy measures the number of internal arrangements of a system that result in the same outward appearance. Entropy rises because, for statistical reasons, a system evolves toward states that have many internal arrangements. A variety of previous research has provided “lots of hints that there’s some sort of association between intelligence and entropy maximization,” says Alex Wissner-Gross of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). On the grandest scale, for example, theorists have argued that choosing possible universes that create the most entropy favors cosmological models that allow the emergence of intelligent observers.

This, I think, would give some degree of a quantitative description of intelligence, a characteristics that so far defy such a clear description. And yes, I'm discounting the silly IQ test as a measure of intelligence. Linking it to a concept in physics allows for a more definite foundation to define and measure intelligence.

Will be fascinating to see how far this will lead.

Zz.

When Belief Trumps Scholarship

The most significant argument against Creationism/Intelligent Design is that the proponents of these beliefs tends to try to find faults in existing concept of evolution, but without providing evidence of their own in support of their beliefs. The most often line of attack by these people is what we often normally refer to using the concept of "god of the gaps", where one tries to find some evidence or observations that defies current scientific explanation.

The problem with this, of course, is that these "gaps" often continue to shrink over time, and as our understanding of the world around us expand and improve. The ancient civilization used to think that the moving clouds, the eclipses, the ebb and flow of ocean tides, etc., were all due to some act of gods, because they didn't have any knowledge of what caused them. Now, we know better and these events are no longer mysterious or mystical.

And that's where we come back to the ID crowd. More often than not, they lack the necessary scientific evidence to strengthen their arguments. And when they try, the only people they could convince are people who really are not well-equipped to actually decipher the science. This appears to be the case of the latest book titled "Darwin's Doubt" written by Stephen Meyer, who runs the Discovery Institute. He's a non-biologist, who is trying to argue that the rapid explosion of animal phylia in the Cambrian period cannot be explained via the slow and tedious process of evolution, and thus, via invoking the god-of-the-gaps, points to evidence of an intelligent designer.

Whenever someone brings up a scientific point, it must be countered with equivalent scientific point. And this is exactly what has been done in this case. A review of this book written by UC Berkeley's Charles Marshall in this week's issue of Science (Science, v.341, p.1344 (2013)) did just that. In this review, Marshall pointed out several flaws in the biological/scientific points presented in Meyer's book.

However, my hope soon dissipated into disappointment. His case against current scientific explanations of the relatively rapid appearance of the animal phyla rests on the claim that the origin of new animal body plans requires vast amounts of novel genetic information coupled with the unsubstantiated assertion that this new genetic information must include many new protein folds. In fact, our present understanding of morphogenesis indicates that new phyla were not made by new genes but largely emerged through the rewiring of the gene regulatory networks (GRNs) of already existing genes (1). Now Meyer does touch on this: He notes that manipulation of such networks is typically lethal, thus dismissing their role in explaining the Cambrian explosion. But today's GRNs have been overlain with half a billion years of evolutionary innovation (which accounts for their resistance to modification), whereas GRNs at the time of the emergence of the phyla were not so encumbered. The reason for Meyer's idiosyncratic fixation with new protein folds is that one of his Discovery Institute colleagues has claimed that those are mathematically impossibly hard to evolve on the timescale of the Cambrian explosion.

In other words, this scientific argument doesn't hold water.

Unfortunately, and I can see this happening often, the counter argument to this book will not reach those who should be aware of it. The same with the perpetual argument that evolution violates the 2nd law of Thermodynamics, those who belief in ID will use this as the scientific argument against the evolution of life on Earth, without being aware of the holes in Meyer's book.

But at least now, you know that there is a scientific counter argument to what Meyer has brought up, and you can point to this Science review article.

Zz.

70 Years Of Schrodinger's "What Is Life?" Lectures

If you were not alive 70 years ago, this news article provides a very good summary of the landmark set of lectures by Erwin Schrodinger on a surprising topic for a physicists - What is Life?

One of Schrödinger's key aims was to explain how living things apparently defy the second law of thermodynamics – according to which all order in the universe tends to break down. It was this that led my colleague Professor Brian Cox to use Schrödinger as the starting point of his BBC series Wonders of Life, leading to What is Life? shooting up the Amazon sales chart.

But Schrödinger's book contains something far more important than his attempt to fuse physics and biology. In that lecture 70 years ago, he introduced some of the most important concepts in the history of biology, which continue to frame how we see life.

I'm wondering if many crackpots and creationists got the idea of the evolution of life violating the 2nd law from this lecture. It might easily be the impetus for such misinformation to be passed on.

Anyhow, this is a very good news article to get a brief idea on that monumental lecture in the history of science.

Zz.

Quantum Biology

I had mentioned already on the emerging connection between quantum mechanics and some aspects of biological phenomena (see here, here, and here). This BBC science article reviews the current effort to use quantum mechanics to explain some of the biological effects.

The most established of the three is photosynthesis - the staggeringly efficient process by which plants and some bacteria build the molecules they need, using energy from sunlight. It seems to use what is called "superposition" - being seemingly in more than one place at one time.

Watch the process closely enough and it appears there are little packets of energy simultaneously "trying" all of the possible paths to get where they need to go, and then settling on the most efficient.

You may read the other examples that they gave in that article. But what irked me slightly is what was mentioned near the beginning of the article.

Disappearing in one place and reappearing in another. Being in two places at once. Communicating information seemingly faster than the speed of light

This kind of weird behaviour is commonplace in dark, still laboratories studying the branch of physics called quantum mechanics, but what might it have to do with fresh flowers, migrating birds, and the smell of rotten eggs?
.
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Until recently, the delicate states of matter predicted by quantum mechanics have only been accessed with the most careful experiments: isolated particles at blisteringly low temperatures or pressures approaching that of deep space. 

That is utterly false, because our modern electronics are the proof to counter that. QM isn't restricted to such esoteric conditions. QM is what is responsible for our iPhones, iPads, computers, MRI, electron microscopes, flat-panel TVs, PET scans, etc... etc. Sure, to be able to observe the "weird" behavior of QM, we will have to go to extremely difficult conditions, but the description of QM are directly used for many everyday items and process. After all, this is what the biologist here are trying to do as well, use the description of QM to explain observed, macroscopic biological phenomena.

BBC News science section needs to get rid of this myth quickly. It undermines the usefulness of QM.

Zz.

Biological Physics

... or Biophysics? You be the judge.

While all the attention in physics has been on the discovery of the Higgs and also the recent landing on Mars, it is important that we keep informing the public that physics, and physicists, are more than just these narrow areas of study. In fact, the MAJORITY of physicists are not even in these two fields that have garnered a disproportional amount of publicity lately.

So it is rather nice to read this article on biological physics, a field where both biology and physics come together.

So let me lay my credentials on the table. I am a soft matter-cum-biological physicist and what excites me is the world around me, the soft squidgy stuff that turns up ubiquitously scattered around our houses in food, cosmetics, paint and ointments, in bulk plastics and novel materials for renewable energy devices; but also, pervasively, in the tissues of our own bodies and the rest of the animal kingdom. Yes, physics and biology can sometimes collide and when they do, it can produce something entirely new.

We need to expose both the public and students getting into physics to the wide variety of subject matter that are part of physics, not just to some esoteric ideas that do not have a clear application to their everyday lives.

Zz.

You Want Us To "Consider" The Creator Hypothesis?

It seems that there's a delicious fight going on between Rabbi Lurie on Huffington Post, and U. of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne. I will let you read it for yourself.

What I will address is the tired plea from many of these people, and also a common tactic done by crackpots. They want us to spend time and effort to "consider" their position. "Why don't you consider such-and-such?" "Why don't you try to understand my theory?" Yet, all this while, THEY refused to do the same to OUR position. If this Rabbi wants us to ".. at least consider that there could be a Designer... ", then I'd say that it is fair to ask this Rabbi to ".. at least consider that there could be NO Designer"! How about them apples, huh? Has he done it? Has he read AND UNDERSTOOD Hawking's argument? Has he read and understood Lawrence Krauss's argument?

It seems that it is always the scientists that have been asked to "disprove" of something, rather than these people showing ample validity for things they believe in. And do you want to know why? Because the physical characteristics of this "designer" can't be defined and agreed upon by all those who believe in it! There's no science that can consider testing for something that is so shifty and vague! So far, the most common argument for the "apparent" existence of one is in the form of the "god of the gaps". And we all know what happens to such a concept - the "gaps" get smaller as we know more and more about things. The anthropic principle, for example, has a lot of detractors and many arguments against such a thing. Using it as one of your supporting argument (all without knowing the intimate physics of what it is) is a risky practice and could fall right into your face.

So for this Rabbi to insist that we should "consider" such possibility is laughable, because the concept of a "designer" is unfalsifiable and "not even wrong"! If he wants us to consider the possibility, then it is only fair that he consider the opposite possibility. That is, of course, assuming that he has the ability to understand the physics with his "post-graduate level" physics courses, whatever those are.

Zz.

Are Mammals Ferroelectric?

Back in the 70's (and I'm going to date myself here), Gary Neuman and his Tubeaway Army had a big hit (at least in the UK) with the song "Are Friends Electric". So when I came across this review article on the study of mammals tissue that are ferroelectric, that tune came back into my head.

This is a rather interesting study because it leads to question on why and to what purpose is the ferroelectricity in such tissues.

The above discovery poses interesting questions regarding the purpose of ferroelectricity in aorta walls, where the blood pressure is highest and most pulsatile. Could the engineering principles of ferroelectricity, only mastered in modern times by mankind, have already been implemented in nature for millions of years? For example, could ferroelectricity function as a critical component in a local integrated memorylike structure, together with nerves within the aorta? Could it help sense very small temperature changes in our blood flow to help maintain temperature homeostasis? Could it also be a force sensor and play a role in blood pressure homeostasis? Or could it help dissipate the mechanical work into thermal energy when the aorta walls are subjected to strong transient shear flows in the blood? While these questions may stir up curiosity and further investigations from a fundamental standpoint, another important question is, how can we benefit from this finding through engineering? For example, can the change of ferroelectricity due to the local damage in the aorta walls be probed as a damage reporter? Can it guide effective drug delivery to local damaged zones in the aorta, and can ferroelectricity in the aortal walls be manipulated to prevent cholesterol from depositing onto the aorta walls, or help clean the deposited cholesterol, which may also possess ferroelectricity?

And again, this is another example where knowledge and advances in physics (in this case, condensed matter physics) have direct impact in other fields such as biology.

Zz.

Origin Of Life At CERN

A rather fascinating and unexpected topic of a workshop held at CERN recently.

On 20 May, a small group of biologists and chemists arrived at Cern for a workshop from the institution's experts on how to organise a disparate community of research groups all over the world into a single scientific force. While much of the research at Cern is focused on the beginnings of the Universe, the delegates also held a discussion on the beginnings of life.

Much of the research in the field is currently focused on so-called "autocatalytic sets". These are groups of molecules that undergo reactions where all molecules mutually catalyse each other -- speed up the rate at which the reaction takes place. In this way, the sets are self-sustaining. It's believed that protocells emerged from such a system, but there's a significant question mark over how likely it is for these sets to occur randomly.

There's plenty of opportunities to expand the horizon of a facility and organization such as CERN. This certainly is one way that it can contribute to a field of study that needs the expertise and capability that CERN has.

Zz.