Yesterday I visited @oritpeleg.bsky.social’s apiary at Boulder, and was super super lucky to witness bees swarming back to the hive 🐝 ! The tense smile is somewhere between super excited and super nervous about the bees on my face net....

Check out our Review on #AFM in plants now on @jxbotany.bsky.social !

Luiselotte Rausch@luiselotterausch.bsky.social · 2w ago

Now in @jxbotany.bsky.social ! Check out our opinion piece on Atomic Force Microscopy #afm in Plant Biomechanic Research: A powerful tool that needs careful handling, interpretation & more research! @Klaus Harter, @moscabiomeclab.bsky.social at @zmbp-tuebingen.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...

Looking forwards! And i am sticking around Boulder for a couple of weeks if anyone wants to chat 😁

Orit Peleg@oritpeleg.bsky.social · 3w ago

Boulder friends: if you're in town, come see Yasmine Meroz's talk on how plants sense, compute, and behave with no brain or nervous system! Thu 7/23, 2-3pm, JSCBB A104 @ CU Boulder. All welcome 🌻 @merozlab.bsky.social

Ever stretch a plastic bag until it wrinkled? Keeping a thin sheet flat while it rapidly expands is surprisingly difficult. So how do growing plant leaves remain flat as they rapidly grow? Check out our new @currentbiology.bsky.social review, How to Grow a Flat Leaf www.cell.com/current-biol...

How to grow a flat leaf

Peng et al. review mechanisms driving lamina expansion, including gene expression, auxin-mediated proliferation, and microtubule-directed growth, linking disrupted coordination to morphological defect...

cell.com

Underwater aliens? Beautiful byproducts of a spherification demo 😅

🎲 This week in "Physics of Living Systems, Lab+Kitchen": Diffusion and random walks! 🧞‍♂️ Magic connection between microscopic random movement & deterministic bulk dynamics 🦄 How these dynamics shape organisms? 👨‍🍳 Chef Shahar Dabbah exemplified diffusion length via spherification of tasty gel spheres!🧋

Fireflies “have been doing computer science well before we even existed.” — Andrew Moiseff, a biologist at the University of Connecticut quantamagazine.org/how-do-firef...

🔬 This week in my course “Physics of Living Systems - in the Lab and Kitchen”, we explored viscosity & its microscopic origins. 👨‍🍳 Chef Yaniv Gur Arieh demonstrated different methods for sauce thickening: emulsions, gelatinization, reduction & modernist polymers. So much (tasty) soft matter physics!

Plants are everywhere 🌳 but rarely thought of as computing. New review (preprint 🪩 lnkd.in/d5KwzzPN): plants sense, compute, and move without a brain - via growth, combining physical computation, embodied intelligence & functional noise. A physics view of decentralized behavior in living matter 🌱

🥐 Master Baker Yuval Elhadeff shows how dough elasticity is manipulated by changing network properties of gluten! 🪩 1st demo in my course ”Physics of living systems, lab+kitchen”. When we cook we manipulate bio tissue with processes rooted in physics. More to come!

Awesome view from Artemis II this morning.

28 months later: In December 2024, I participated in the Ernst Strüngmann Forum on #Navigation #Research 🧭🧪 Now the book has been published including our chapter of group 2 ("team zoo" 🦠🐜🐦🦞🐒🦍🐢🤖) on the "Universal Principles of Navigation across Species and Spatial Scales" ↘️ doi.org/10.1007/978-... ↙️

Preprint 🌱 Plants build nonlinear vectorial representations of light patterns! Surprising results: Opposing cues cancel, so plants grow towards a weaker tie-breaker light. Plants respond to sum of transduced signals, not physical sum of light: optical “illusions”! 🪩 tinyurl.com/44f83xh8

Honeybee swarms do not come together and fall apart in the same way 🐝 In this new preprint led by Danielle Chase, we report how to trick swarms to repeatedly assemble and disassemble in front of our cameras, while tracking individual bees in 3D! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New preprint 🌱 Segment plants in time-series images using foundation model SAM2 - without training a model 🪩. Magician Alex Abbey! 💡SAP works across species, scales, and even z-stacks. From single cells to whole plants→ quantitative growth & dynamics . tinyurl.com/3raedtvm @biosofttau.bsky.social

🌱 “To twine or not to twine?” Preprint 🪩 Plants use inherent circular movements (circumnuations) for active sensing of support mechanical stability (eg whisking 🐭), twining occurs at a torque threshold. Heroic experiments by Amir Ohad, fancy simulations @amirporat.bsky.social: tinyurl.com/2syh4ny3

#LivingArchitectures Congratulations @manuelthery.bsky.social @lblanchoin.bsky.social and all Scientists of the #CytoMorphoLab for their poetic vision of the microscopic level.

✨ New preprint from the lab on firefly synchronization, led by Owen Martin (freshly Dr. Martin!), with Nataliya Nechyporenko and Kaushik Jayaram. Our measured firefly phase-response curves reveal excitatory and inhibitory timing rules that facilitate population synchrony ✨ doi.org/10.64898/202...

Job alert🚨I am advertising a 2-year postdoctoral position to work on the mathematics of plant morphogenesis @mpipz.bsky.social. Candidates with interests in mathematical modelling, mechanics, or biophysics are strongly encouraged to apply. 🌱Reposts are appreciated! jobs.mpipz.mpg.de/jobposting/4...

Artist+friend Liat Segal and I gave a fun talk at TRANSMEET Art+Science Festival (www.transmeet-festival.org ) "Art–science collaborations: Generators of new ideas and serendipitous events" (based on our paper bit.ly/4ohpuHu) After all, both artists & scientists are driven by asking questions

Art–science collaborations: Generators of new ideas and serendipitous events | Quantitative Plant Biology | Cambridge Core

Art–science collaborations: Generators of new ideas and serendipitous events - Volume 4

bit.ly

It's funny how in space all intuition about basic stuff - like water - goes out the window

Oxford Mathematics@oxfordmathematics.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Where on earth is the best laboratory to demonstrate the beauty of fluid dynamics? Actually, it’s not on earth. Here is the story of the soft cell. And a longer read: www.maths.ox.ac.uk/node/74308

We’re hiring! 🚨 Assistant Professor (TT) in Theoretical or Computational Biological Physics @univmiami.bsky.social 😀 Come build the future of interdisciplinary biophysics with us! Apply by Dec 15 → tinyurl.com/5n9bk836 #Biophysics #PhysicsJobs #AcademicJobs #UMiami

Call for Applications for the Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellowship-2026-27 azrielifoundation.org/azrieli-fell...

Call for Applications for the Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellowship-2026-27 - The Azrieli Foundation

azrielifoundation.org

New paper!💡 Amir Ohad developed this nifty setup to measure weak forces generated by freely moving plants, based on the deflection of a pendulum (straw from the cafeteria 😎), which does not require any tethering of the plant: academic.oup.com/jxb/advance-... Plant-obstacle interactions here we come!

I can what this all day.

Wonder of Science@wonderofscience.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Commander Dave Scott of Apollo 15 validates Galileo's theory on the Moon by dropping a hammer and a feather, proving that objects fall at the same speed, independent of their mass.

הכנתי לסטודנטים כמה הדגמות של ויזואליזציה של פונקציות מרוכבות למי שבעניין yohai.github.io/complex

💡Best way to learn electronics and ARDUINO for lab work? 🎨In an artist’s studio of course! Inspired by her amazing work, students (and some brave PIs) joined artist & friend Liat Segal in her studio for a workshop on the basics. Thanks @biosofttau.bsky.social for help funding!

Come fly with us, let's fly, let's fly away. Full details: www.maths.ox.ac.uk/node/74169

I am super excited to announce that we have a tenure-track faculty position in biophysics open in the Department of Physics at Carnegie Mellon! 🧪 Interfolio link: apply.interfolio.com/174360 PLEASE, share widely across the blue skies! Let me briefly explain what we're looking for: 1/10

I'm really looking forward to hosting this @metagov.bsky.social seminar on the governance of bees, fireflies, and plants with my colleage @oritpeleg.bsky.social: luma.com/pzbp4zq1

Seminar: Governance Among Plants & Insects with Dr. Orit Peleg · Zoom · Luma

Dr. Orit Peleg seeks to understand the behavior of disordered living systems by merging tools from physics, biology, engineering, and computer science. At the…

luma.com