The math of stressed-out cells, plus 10 years of reporting on Elon Musk
Bowler Hat Science from Matthew R Francis
I am on deadline (big shocker) and stressed as tickety-boo (also a big shocker), but let no one say I skipped the newsletter this week!
Stressing Microbes to Create Macroscopic Patterns
For SIAM News, I described research on the mathematics of packing microbes onto a surface, and how their growth and division leads to macroscopic patterns that are familiar from photos of Petri dishes.
Microbes in Petri dishes often grow in distinctive circular or wavelike patterns that are visible even without a microscope (see Figure 1). These growth formations develop without any long-range communication between individual cells, which means that they arise from microscopic mechanical and biochemical interactions rather than environmental factors. External forces—e.g., the borders of the Petri dish, added chemicals, or fluid properties of the growth medium—affect the macroscopic patterns in unique ways.
To understand the emergence of collective growth patterns, one must draw connections between several factors across a range of length scales. Computational biologists, mathematicians, and biomedical engineers use numerical simulation techniques to model the way in which idealized bacteria form macroscopic patterns simply from the stresses that they exert on each other as they grow and multiply [2]. “You have a cell that grows and divides, grows and divides,” Scott Weady of the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Biology said. “How does a bacterium that slows its growth in response to pressure influence the global mechanics of the colony?”
Elon Musk has always been bad
I don’t want to be the “I told you so” guy, but let’s face it: I’ve been reporting on Elon Musk for a decade now (and others have been reporting on him longer than me!) and he has always been bad. From his abuse of his first wife to saying “F*** Earth!” about efforts to save the world from climate change to offering a horse in exchange for sex from an employee to [the list goes on and on and on], it’s clear that the man who has illegally taken over the federal government spending system and installed far-right interns in their teens and twenties should not be anywhere in authority. Here are a few things I’ve written over the years, most of which are comics in collaboration with the extraordinary Maki Naro:
Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? Elon Musk Thinks So (comics collaboration with Maki Naro, The Nib, December 5, 2016)
Elon Musk’s Plans for Mars Colonization Lack Vision (comic with Maki Naro, The Nib, March 22, 2018)
Who Owns an Asteroid? (comic with Maki Naro, The Nib, February 11, 2019)
Our Vanishing Sky (comic with Maki Naro, The Nib, published in the print issue “Nature”)
Musk and Bezos Offer Humanity a Grim Future in Space Colonies (Scientific American, June 26, 2023)
Bowlerhattishly thine,
Matthew
Support me: