Because there’s not much oxygen deep underground, the bacteria that live there have evolved other ways to get rid of the electrons they produce when they “breathe”. One of these workarounds involves sending out conductive filaments – nanowires – into the soil to disperse the electrons, but important details of this process have eluded biophysicists’ understanding. Researchers at Yale University, US and NOVA University Lisbon in Portugal have now found that for bacteria in the genus Geobacter, a single protein family acts like a series of electrically connecting “plugs” for charging these micro ..read more

How many fish make up a school? It sounds like one of those trick questions, but physicists at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and the University of Bristol have now found an answer. To do so they fitted a “bowl-shaped” aquarium at Bristol University with cameras to track the three-dimensional trajectories of zebrafish, studying group sizes of two, three, four and fifty fish (Nature Comms 15 2591). The researchers then used methods from statistical physics to analyse swimming patterns and deduce the minimum group size where individual movements change and become coordinated group patterns ..read more

Can you explain the origin of life on Earth using the principles of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics? It’s not a question that even physics students see in their more challenging assignments. But it is one that Liam Graham – physicist turned economist – attempts to answer in his debut book Molecular Storms: the Physics of Stars, Cells and the Origin of Life. Throughout Molecular Storms, Graham uses a light, informal tone with a measured injection of humour to keep readers on a direct path from the laws of thermodynamics to the inception of biological diversity. He begins by painting a ..read more

We’ve all experienced it. You’re sat outside – perhaps camping with a lantern, perhaps relaxing in your garden, or maybe even walking home with a torch – and then suddenly, there are swarms of insects gathering around the light. It’s a phenomenon that’s been seen for many years, and an approach that has been used to trap insects since Roman times. But until now, the reason why insects exhibit this behaviour has eluded scientists. Sam Fabian from Imperial College London, Yash Sondhi from Florida International University, and their wider research teams have now resolved this mystery. When asked ..read more

The Biophysical Society Annual Meeting is the largest annual gathering of biophysicists from around the world. Bringing together leading scientists who work at the interface between the life, physical and computational sciences, BPS 2024 allows attendees to share their latest findings and learn about the newest emerging techniques and applications. The meeting runs from 10 to 14 February, in Philadelphia, PA, with some 5000 delegates expected to attend. The event incorporates symposia, workshops, poster presentations and the Biophysical Society Lecture, as well as career, educat ..read more

A new study on the mechanical stability of bonds between the spike protein on the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its receptors on human cells during infection has revealed differences in the binding stability of viral variants such as Omicron and Delta. The finding, from researchers in the Netherlands, Germany and the US, could help explain why some variants spread more quickly than others. SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, contains four structural proteins: envelope (E); membrane (M); nucleocapsid (N); and spike (S). The M, E and S proteins are vital for assembling and forming the virus ..read more

If you want to measure an everyday object, you might use a ruler – a piece of material with a fixed length and regularly-marked divisions. Thanks to a new device called a PicoRuler, the same measurement principle can now be applied to tiny objects such as cells and molecules. Developed by researchers at Julius-Maximilians Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Germany, the miniscule measuring stick works in biological environments and could be used to test the ability of super-resolution microscopy techniques to image objects less than 10 nm long. Super-resolution microscopy based on fluorescence imagi ..read more

A series of neutron scattering measurements has uncovered the structure of viral DNA in unprecedented detail, shedding new light on changes that make the DNA more fluid-like at temperatures close to that of the human body. According to the researchers at Lund University, Sweden, who performed the measurements, these structural changes help explain the rapidity with which viruses release DNA into host cells, so facilitating infection. Unlike bacteria or fungi, viruses cannot survive without a host. Once they infect a cell, though, they produce new virus particles that then infect other cells. T ..read more

For human-built aircraft, turbulence is an old and knotty problem. One of the first recorded human flight attempts, by an 11th-century monk called Eilmer, ended when his birdlike wood-and-leather wings couldn’t handle what the chronicler calls “the violence of the wind and the swirling of air”. A thousand years later, the same phenomenon continues to bedevil the aerospace industry, racking up costs in lost fuel, lost lunches, lost missions and even lost lives. Curiously, though, the birds that inspired Eilmer seem to cope with turbulence just fine. Indeed, some birds actually exploit it, using ..read more

Supercomputing study Sayan Roychowdhury of Duke University presents his team’s work on simulating cancer cell transport through the body. (Courtesy: Kevin Jackson) The SC23 conference, held earlier this month, broke previous audience records with over 14,000 attendees heading to Denver, CO, to find out about the latest achievements in high-performance computing (HPC). Like every other year, the conference hosted a variety of lectures that allowed scientists to discuss how supercomputing positively impacted their fields. With HPC invaluable to just about every scientific domain, biological stud ..read more