About a recent paper on biological light emission. Do you emit light? The naive answer is no. None of us light up a room as we enter, other than perhaps metaphorically. The intermediate level answer, familiar to undergraduate physics majors, is yes — not by virtue of being alive but because of fundamental thermodynamics: everything ..read more

It’s February 2025 and this, like some of my other recent posts (here, here), could be a snapshot of a landscape being transformed by the roaring river of artificial intelligence. But it isn’t. Rather, I’ll describe my puzzlement that some parts of the landscape that I’m close to aren’t changing much, and speculate about the ..read more

Last term (Fall 2024) I again taught the computational image analysis course I developed a few years ago (see 2021, 2022). It was again a mixed graduate and undergraduate course, this time with an enrollment of 18: 14 graduate and 4 undergraduate. For a primarily graduate elective course, this is a large number of students ..read more

Once again, highlights of the books I read in the past year, featuring the end (for now) of my education in twentieth-century semi-organized crime, a book on semi-organized twentieth-century chimpanzees, and more. (Previous years: 2023, 2022, …, 2015.) Books by people who passed away in 2024 The best non-fiction book I read this year was James C ..read more

About a recent paper from my lab: Julia S Ngo, Piyush Amitabh, Jonah G Sokoloff, Calvin Trinh, Travis J Wiles, Karen Guillemin, and Raghuveer Parthasarathy, “The Vibrio Type VI Secretion System Induces Intestinal Macrophage Redistribution and Enhanced Intestinal Motility,” mBio, (2024). A few years ago, my lab discovered that Vibrio cholerae, the bacteria that cause ..read more

I’m always interested to hear who won the latest Physics Nobel Prize, and today’s announcement was particularly exciting: John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” Is it surprising? Is it controversial? Apparently yes. I predicted Hopfield in response to a friend’s poll a few ..read more

Salary negotiations are currently underway at the University of Oregon (UO) between the faculty union and the administration. If this sounds familiar: graduate student salary negotiations concluded earlier this year. Two weeks ago, the administration emailed a description of its perspective on faculty pay that included some interesting data and graphs, such as the amount ..read more

On January 5, 2024, the graduate student union at the University of Oregon (UO) announced that they would go on strike, giving notice that it would begin on January 17. On January 15, the union and the university administration reached a deal, averting in the nick of time a strike and the massive disruption that would have accompanied it. This was one of the most interesting recent dramas at UO, and it mirrors dramas at other universities, and perhaps mirrors ongoing dramas involving the faculty union and the UO administration. For these reasons, and because my memory grows hazier with every ..read more

Insulin is an abomination. Sure, injecting it saves the lives of millions of diabetics, but that injected protein is unnatural and abhorrent, the product of a genetically modified organism! And it’s not even necessary: Rather than playing God to coax single-celled creatures never designed for insulin production to make the stuff, we could be harvesting it naturally, like we used to just a few decades ago. After all, one need only slaughter about 20,000 pigs or cows to provide a pound of insulin! If this argument strikes you as absurd or even horrific, it should. A protein is a protein; if we ..read more

This past term I taught my “Biophysics for non-science majors” course, actually called “The Physics of Life,” for the first time since 2018, and, more notably, for the first time since writing my pop-science book, So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World (blog post; Amazon) — published in 2022 (and now out in paperback!). The course and the book aren’t directly related, but teaching early versions of the course, and writing things for it, put me on the path towards the book. Now, appropriately, I used the book for the course, though it’s not written as a text ..read more