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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| I wanted to share this article because a) it's interesting and I have stuff to say about it and b) I wanted to show that even the most serious science communicators, like Quanta, sometimes can't help using a pun in the headline. The Physics of Glass Opens a Window Into Biology  The physicist Lisa Manning studies the dynamics of glassy materials to understand embryonic development and disease. If you're anything like me, you're wondering what the hell glass and biology could possibly have in common. Well, that's what the article's for. The ebb and flow of vehicles along congested highways was what first drew Lisa Manning to her preferred corner of physics... I can relate. I still remember the epiphany I got back in engineering school when I realized that the equations of traffic flow are the discrete-math versions of the equations of fluid flow. But it wasn’t until after she had earned her doctorate in physics in 2008 that Manning started applying that enthusiasm to problems in biology. I've noted before that, sometimes, an interdisciplinary approach can solve problems that a focus on one field cannot. Perhaps I'm biased because I prefer to know a little bit about a lot of things than to know a whole lot about one thing and nothing about anything else. ...she learned about what’s known as the differential adhesion hypothesis, an idea developed in the 1960s to explain how groups of cells in embryos move and sort themselves out from one another in response to considerations like surface tension. “It was amazing that such a simple physical idea could explain so much biological data, given how complicated biology is,” said Manning, who is now an associate professor of physics at Syracuse University. “That work really convinced me that there could be a place for this kind of [physics-based] thinking in biology.” "Amazing," sure, but to me, it's not surprising. Complexity emerges from simplicity, not the other way around. And biology is basically chemistry which is basically physics, so even there, it should be no surprise that one field can inform the other. She took inspiration from the dynamics of glasses, those disordered solid materials that resemble fluids in their behavior. I'm going to digress for a moment, here. Glass has been described as a "solid liquid." When touring some historical site lo these many years ago—hell, it might have been Monticello—I heard a tour guide assert that being a solid liquid, glass flows very, very slowly under the influence of gravity, and that's why all these old windows are wavy and thicker at the bottom. This didn't sit right with me then, so I looked into it (this was pre-internet, so it involved an actual trip to an actual library). Turns out that no, glass is solid, period. It doesn't flow any more than rocks do, assuming ordinary temperatures (of course it flows when heated enough to change phase). The waviness of pre-industrial glass is a result of its manufacturing process, and apparently, they'd often install the panes with the thicker bits at the bottom, for whatever reason. Point is, people confuse "glass resembles a fluid" with "glass flows, albeit very slowly." Which is understandable, though really, tour guides should know better. The reason we say glass is fluid-like is that most solids have a crystalline structure of some sort, at the atomic level. But glass does not; its atomic structure is disordered. I mention all this in case someone's still got that idea in their head that glass is a slow-moving liquid; the article doesn't make it clear (see, I can pun, too) until it gets into the interview portion. Manning found that the tissues in our bodies behave in many of the same ways. As a result, with insights gleaned from the physics of glasses, she has been able to model the mechanics of cellular interactions in tissues, and uncover their relevance to development and disease. Unlike the relatively simple ideas about the atomic structure, or lack thereof, of various solids, the connection to biology is beyond me. The rest of the article is, as I said, an interview, which I'm not quoting here. While I can't pretend to understand a lot of it, I can appreciate her multidisciplinary approach and how insights from one branch of science can illuminate problems from another branch. Incidentally, I find it helps to use a similar approach to writing. Because as much as we like to categorize things, the boundaries tend to blur and become fluid. Like the view through an 18th century window pane. |
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