Rocking Out Biophysics in IUPAB2024 Kyoto!

Kinetic energy is the ability of an object in motion to do work or enact change. It can take on many forms. For instance, water flowing down a waterfall has kinetic energy. In biological systems, particles of light travel and are absorbed by plants to create chemical energy. Animals consume the chemical energy and give off molecules that carry their scent through the air. They also generate kinetic energy when they run away from predators. Entire systems also possess kinetic energy, like the...

The process of converting very light nuclei into heavier nuclei is also accompanied by the conversion of mass into large amounts of energy, a process called fusion. The principal source of energy in the sun is a net fusion reaction in which four hydrogen nuclei fuse and ultimately produce one helium nucleus and two positrons.
A helium nucleus has a mass that is 0.7% less than that of four hydrogen nuclei; this lost mass is converted into energy during the fusion. This reaction produces about...

It’s plausible to suppose that the greater the velocity of a body, the greater effect it could have on other bodies. This does not depend on the direction of the velocity, only its magnitude. At the end of the seventeenth century, a quantity was introduced into mechanics to explain collisions between two perfectly elastic bodies, in which one body makes a head-on collision with an identical body at rest. When they collide, the first body stops, and the second body moves off with the initial...

The kinetic energy of a particle is one-half of the product of the particle’s mass and the square of its speed. Note that just as Newton’s second law can be expressed as either the rate of change of momentum or mass multiplied by the rate of change of velocity, so too can the kinetic energy of a particle be expressed in terms of its mass and momentum, instead of its mass and velocity.

Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is a type of scanning probe microscopy that can analyze topographic details of various specimens like ceramics, glass, polymers, and biological samples. AFM offers over 1000 times more resolution than the optical imaging system. Images generated from AFM are three-dimensional surface profiles, offering an advantage over the flat, two-dimensional images from other imaging techniques.
The AFM Probe
The probe is regarded as the heart of any AFM setup and comprises the...

The word "gas" comes from the Flemish word meaning "chaos," first used to describe vapors by the chemist J. B. van Helmont. Consider a container filled with gas, with a continuous and random motion of molecules. During collisions, the velocity component parallel to the wall is unchanged, and the component perpendicular to the wall reverses direction but does not change in magnitude. If the molecule’s velocity changes in the x-direction, then its momentum is changed. During the short time of the...