Related papers: Antibiotic resistance: a physicist's view
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
This article addresses broad trends in interdisciplinary research in physics where interactions with colleagues in fields such as computer science, ecology, or economics can often be derailed by unintentional clashes of methodologies and…
Social physics is an active and diverse field in which many scientists with formal training in physics study a broad class of complex social phenomena. Social physics investigates societal problems but most often does not count on the…
This paper is a discussion of the physics of magnification in telescopes. Special attention is given to the question of whether telescopes magnify stars. Telescopes do magnify star images, although opinions to the contrary abound.
The observation of neuron-like behaviour in bacteria, such as the occurrence of electric spiking and extended bioelectric signalling, points to the role of membrane dynamics in prokaryotes. Electrophysiology of bacteria, however, has been…
Contrary to claims about the irrelevance of philosophy for science, I argue that philosophy has had, and still has, far more influence on physics than is commonly assumed. I maintain that the current anti-philosophical ideology has had…
The adaptive immune system is a dynamical, self-organized multiscale system that protects vertebrates from both pathogens and internal irregularities, such as tumours. For these reason it fascinates physicists, yet the multitude of…
In this paper we review many interesting open problems in mathematical physics which may be attacked with the help of tools from constructive field theory. They could give work for future mathematical physicists trained with the…
This work introduces a new statistical physics lattice model of bacteria interacting with anti-microbial drugs that can reproduce qualitative features of resistance emergence and whose model parameters and outputs can be measured with…
Friction is one of the fundamental issues in physics, mechanics and material science with lots of practical applications. However, the understanding of macroscopic friction phenomena from microscopic aspect is still on the way. In this…
A significant amount of high-impact contemporary scientific research occurs where biology, computer science, engineering and chemistry converge. Although programmes have been put in place to support such work, the complex dynamics of…
Understanding how antibiotics inhibit bacteria can help to reduce antibiotic use and hence avoid antimicrobial resistance - yet few theoretical models exist for bacterial growth inhibition by a clinically relevant antibiotic treatment…
We discuss some of the key science questions that are bringing particle physicists and astrophysicists together, and comment on some of the cultural and funding issues that have arisen as these two communities become increasingly…
In this article the current understanding of fundamental particles and their interactions is presented for the interested non-specialist, by adopting a semi-historical path. A discussion on the unresolved problems is also presented.
The massive data sets from today's particle physics experiments present a variety of challenges amenable to the tools developed by the statistics community. From the real-time decision of what subset of data to record on permanent storage,…
One of the main activities in science teaching, and in particular in Physics teaching, is not only the discussion of both modern problems and problems which solution is an urgent matter. It means that the picture of an active and alive…
We explore the unique and fascinating structure of neutron stars. Although neutron stars are of interest in many areas of Physics, our aim is to provide an intellectual bridge between Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics. We argue against the…
Nuclear astrophysics is that branch of astrophysics which helps understanding some of the many facets of the Universe through the knowledge of the microcosm of the atomic nucleus. In the last decades much advance has been made in nuclear…
In this little vision paper we analyze the human immune system from a computer science point of view with the aim of understanding the architecture and features that allow robust, effective behavior to emerge from local sensing and actions.…
At finite concentrations of reacting molecules, kinetics of diffusion-controlled reactions is affected by intra-reactant interactions. As a result, multi-particle reaction statistics cannot be deduced from single-particle results. Here we…