journal-club

As a semi frequent flyer, and incredibly impatient stand-behinderer I couldn’t resist linking to this - Time needed to board an airplane: A power law and the structure behind it from a Norwegian group, Vidar Frette and Per Hemmer. Boarding strategy is of great importance to airlines, where the turn around time of planes – especially short haul – can make a real dent in profits. For the authors of this paper, however, it seems they just think it’s a neat model to test out 1D problems where the particles are distinguishable, rather than the more common indistinguishable particles....

A while ago I discussed lipid membranes and how they could exhibit critical behaviour. There were some lovely pictures on criticality on giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) which are sort of model cell walls. That work was done by Sarah Keller and friends in Seattle. This morning on the arXiv I saw this new paper, also by Sarah: Dynamic critical exponent in a 2D lipid membrane with conserved order parameter They look at the critical dynamics of the GUV’s surface....