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I recently got an e-mail from Michelle Oyen after she came across Phil’s post on worm like chains while she was preparing an article for an online journal club at iMechanica. This was the first I had heard of iMechanica, but it seems to be a very interesting community for anyone interested in mechanics. Many leading mechanicians are members of the site including Erik Van der Giessen and Brian DiDonna (two theorists that have recently published interesting papers on biological gels) who both responded to Michelle’s initial post. From now on, I will be cross-posting mechanics related posts like this one at iMechanica to try to reach a broader audience. It seems like it’s also a good place to post job searches and things of that nature. It’s a great site. Check it out.
There’s also a new blog written by Sujit, a colleague here at Penn, called metadatta. He’s an undergraduate interested in condensed matter physics, but based on his ongoing series of posts on computational neuroscience I can only conclude that he is Biocurious. Don’t fight it Sujit. There’s a vibrant bio community in Philadelphia indulging their desire to understand wet matter physics. Join us!
Trying to keep closed access Molecule of the Month: Exosomes
Biocurious is written by Andre Brown and Philip Johnson, since 2005. Content of the weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Thanks for the plug! (You’re right, I am Biocurious, among other things.) You guys do a great job, by the way.
Thanks Sujit!
Speaking of online journal clubs, I found the Journal Club for Condensed Matter Physics just the other day. Its focus is obviously wider than biophysics, but it is supported by the International Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter, and they’re known to be keen on biologically-inspired physics (a couple of the first papers have been biofriendly!). It is run by some huge names in the field, too.
A similar site is the Virtual Journal of Biophysics, which although isn’t a journal club per se (it doesn’t have commentary), it acts as an aggregator for papers of note and is edited by Robert Austin at Princeton. You probably already know about it, but I figured I’d put it out there. (It also has sister journals for superconductivity, quantum information, ultrafast science, and the one I subscribe to, nanoscale science).
Thanks for the references above.
The Journal Club for Condensed Matter Physics entry for 1 JAN:
Evidence for Critical Fluctuations in the Establishment of the Body Plan of a Simple Animal.
Hydro Molecular Network Reaches Criticality at the Symmetry-Breaking Axis-Defining Moment
Authors: Jordi Soriano, Cyril Colombo, and Albrecht Ott
Physical Review Letters 97, 258102 (2006)
The Virtual Journal of Biophysics gas as a recent article:
Dynamical principles in neuroscience
Mechanical physics and biophysics [with robotics] may yet become unified.