Biophysics

Manu Prakash works on the world’s most urgent problems and seemingly frivolous questions at the same time. They add up to a philosophy he calls “recreational biology.”

Micro decisions can have macro consequences. A soft matter physicist reveals how interactions within simple cellular collectives can lead to emergent physical traits.

Physicists and marine biologists built a quantitative framework that predicts how coral polyps collectively construct a variety of coral shapes.

Under the sea ice during the Arctic’s pitch-black polar night, cells power photosynthesis on the lowest light levels ever observed in nature.

Invisibly to us, insects and other tiny creatures use static electricity to travel, avoid predators, collect pollen and more. New experiments explore how evolution may have influenced this phenomenon.

Cell membranes from comb jellies reveal a new kind of adaptation to the deep sea: curvy lipids that conform to an ideal shape under pressure.

By creating digital twins of patients, Amanda Randles wants to bring unprecedented precision to medical forecasts.

After identifying interlocking symmetries in mammalian cells, scientists can describe some tissues as liquid crystals — an observation that lays the groundwork for a fluid-dynamic theory of how tissues move.

Abnormal waves of electrical activity can cause a heart’s muscle cells to beat out of sync. In this episode, Flavio Fenton, an expert in cardiac dynamics, talks with Steve Strogatz about ways to treat heart arrhythmias without resorting to painful defibrillators.