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The distinction between sciences is becoming increasingly more artificial -- an approach from one area can be easily applied to the other. More exciting research nowadays is happening perhaps at the interfaces of disciplines like Physics,…
Quantitative methods and mathematical modeling are playing an increasingly important role across disciplines. As a result, interdisciplinary mathematics courses are increasing in popularity. However, teaching such courses at an advanced…
We have developed a set of laboratories and hands on activities to accompany a new two-semester interdisciplinary physics course that has been successfully developed and tested in two small test classes of students at the University of…
Physics has a reputation among majority of life sciences students for being very complicated and tough. If we leave students with this impression, it is likely that students see physics class as useless and irrelevant to life sciences.…
For this study, we compared the attitudes and beliefs about science of physical science (physics and mathematics) and life science (biochemistry and biology) students at the beginning of their university degrees using the CLASS (Colorado…
Theory and empirical science should be in constant dialogue, but often find it hard to understand one another. Here we describe a graduate-level university course we developed to improve matters. The course was designed to help…
The discipline of `theoretical biology' has been developing from its inception several decades ago almost in parallel with the advances in biology, so much so that the latter is often considered to be almost exclusively an empirical…
Several interdisciplinary areas have appeared at the interface between biological and physical sciences. In this work, we suggest a complex network-based methodology for analyzing the interrelationships between some of these…
How students use mathematics in their physics classes has been studied extensively in the physics education literature. In addition to specific mathematical methods in specific physics contexts, possible effects of more general "cultural"…
Biological systems are influenced by fluid mechanics at nearly all spatiotemporal scales. This broad relevance of fluid mechanics to biology has been increasingly appreciated by engineers and biologists alike, leading to continued expansion…
As a result of the deep modifications of the French physics and chemistry curricula in upper secondary school during these last three years, the physics department of the Universit\'e Paris Diderot (France) wished to develop a renovation…
[Taken from the "README" in the book] My goal with this book is to provide some kind of bridge for mathematics between the high-school-level and college-level for physics students. From my perspective, our job as physicists is to observe…
Despite widespread calls for the incorporation of mathematical modeling into the undergraduate biology curriculum, there is lack of a common understanding around the definition of modeling, which inhibits progress. In this paper, we extend…
High school science classrooms across the United States are answering calls to make computation a part of science learning. The problem is that there is little known about the barriers to learning that computation might bring to a science…
Advances in science and engineering often reveal the limitations of classical approaches initially used to understand, predict, and control phenomena. With progress, conceptual categories must often be re-evaluated to better track recently…
In ancient times, electricity was viewed as a spirit or soul residing in an inanimate substance. A fluid image was introduced in an attempt to visualize its movement. It was also an effort to concretize its nature into the realm of physical…
Despite the large corpus of biology training text, the impact of reasoning models on biological research generally lags behind math and coding. In this work, we show that biology questions from current large-scale reasoning datasets do not…
A vast body of literature addresses the complex nature of science's reproducibility crisis. In contrast with this perceived complexity, some recent papers from the discipline of physics suggests that irreproducibility does not point to a…
Energy is a complex idea that cuts across scientific disciplines. For life science students, an approach to energy that incorporates chemical bonds and chemical reactions is better equipped to meet the needs of life sciences students than a…
Biological and robotic grasp and manipulation are undeniably similar at the level of mechanical task performance. However, their underlying fundamental biological vs. engineering mechanisms are, by definition, dramatically different and can…