(Synthesis Post) Physics and Biology- What do they have in common?

By Dan O., Cameron O., Guangyao Q., Mine G.

Through the course of our blog, we’ve posted on both biological and physical topics. Some of these topics were interesting and we felt that they would appeal to the reader’s interests. Others were posted because they were a relevant and current breakthrough within our field and we aimed to provide current information and our own thoughts. Even when the blog consisted of biology and physics majors, we strived to update our blog with connections between the two whenever possible, and in the process, found that physics and biology had much larger and deeper links than anyone would have ever believed.

Biology is known as the science of living organisms, and considered to be a field that is involved in our lives the most. It started changing lives centuries ago and still helps us understand the life within the organisms better. When it comes to the applications of biology, one may see a lot of different fields such as criminology, physics, chemistry and so on. Giving an example, genetics, which is a subfield of biology that studies the genes, plays an important role to understand genetic disorders, predict what disorder a person might be likely to develop in the future, and find genes to treat certain disorders in living organisms. As it is mentioned on our post, “Significance of Human Genetics: Laron Syndrome” by Mine G., studies show that a disorder might be a possible key to throw cancer and diabetes out of our world. Another application of biology that we will explain now might sound very futuristic, however, scientists are persistent to succeed. Cloning! Cloning is probably one of the most interesting and phenomenon that biology is involved in. Even though scientists managed to clone even mammal cells, such as the sheep Dolly, further studies of cloning are still ongoing. Biology has enlightened many mysterious cases for humans to live a better life, and biological studies will keep going as long as living organisms exist on the world.

As we learn more about the world around us and how it works, we as humans are always trying to find ways to make it better the same goes for biology. One example of how biology is being improved can be found in an article written by Cameron O. called “Plants Fighting Viruses”. To quickly sum up the article, it briefly goes over information found at Indiana University, that describes the results of switching a gene within the plant. First the plants are chemically modified so they can grow and glow under UV light, letting us visually see how this gene change causes the plant to go from fighting bacteria within itself to being able to fight of specific viruses within itself. After the study was done the biological scientists at Indiana University were shocked to learn that this plant unexpectedly changed from only being able to protect itself from the bacteria to being able to defend also against a specific type of virus. This can be implemented over the crop growing economy so if a virus spreads among crops throughout the country, they may be able to find a gene to switch or add that can protect the crops from being destroyed. This can be wonderful on the economy of crop growing agriculture and the farmers who work so hard to bring food to the world. Biology can be seen anywhere we go, and when we travel we look for it. People and animals throughout time migrate to places with things like sustainable resources, and are always looking for ways to take what they have and make more of it. We are connected to biology and will always depend on it, so finding ways for things like crops to be more secure is always something to push for.

Biology has done many things within the world, but it is not the only major to have its breakthroughs. Physics has allowed us to unlock secrets of our universe that were hidden before. One major secret that was unlocked was dark matter, which was outlined within the blog post “What’s so dark about dark matter” by Dan O, in which we presented that dark matter was found recently to be 27% of our universe, while dark energy is approximately 68% of our universe. The finding of dark matter and energy encapsulates physics very well because while dark matter is a breakthrough all on its own, a great amount about it is still unknown such as its properties or uses. We see that dark matter is a description of how the field of physics operates, using three distinct ideas. We will always learn and discover new things. The things we understand about these will grow over time. The things we don’t understand will always be larger.

There are tons of applications of physics in daily life. For instance, GPS is required for modern daily life. People need it to find a closest way to the restaurant; People need it to get the direction to shopping malls. GPS is vital and supported by multiple satellites. Both of general theory of relativity and special theory of relativity are applied in GPS. Due to the effect of the special theory of relativity, the surrounding time of a high-speed object goes slowly.  Follow general theory of relativity, the surrounding time of a satellite is also effected by the strong gravity, which comes from Earth. These errors are revised every second. Without revising correct time of a satellite, the surrounding time of a satellite will be 38𝓾s faster than the time in equator every day. 38𝓾s* speed of light= 11.4 km. A satellite, which was not revised every second, had errors, which were 11.4 km every day. Then, GPS was useless cause it located people in wrong places. If you were locating yourself by using smart phones, you would be located in someway, which was at least 11.4 km far away from your place, and, properly, would be located in a lake. DNA is a cornerstone for modern biology. DNA can be understood as a hard-drive, which saves all the data of human beings’ body. How did scientists find such an important thing? They used physics. By applying the diffraction of X-rays, scientists found out the double helix structure of DNA. Then, they had the conclusion that there are only four possible kinds of elements in each arm of double helix structure, which can be also seen as codes of heredity. Since that, human beings have the ability to unravel codes of heredity. There are still a lot of applications of physics. As we’ve mentioned, many of them changes have changed the world already.

While physics and biology have both had breakthroughs within their own fields, the two majors have more connections than people may realize. One application is referenced within the blog post “Nearsightedness and its potential causes” by Cameron O,  where we explained a general description of near sightedness and how new technology has forced our eyesight to change. Things such as using things such as phone and computer screens at a close range and spending more time indoors are some explanations as to why this problem has began to grow over the past few years and is expected it increase further as we become more dependent on the use of everyday technology. The ways that biology and physics can be seen connecting within this topic is that when we look at TV or video games, it trains our eye to look at things that are closer, changing the shape of our eye. This change in shape means that the light coming into our eyes intersects before the focal point, causing things that are far away to appear blurrier than things closer to us. This process is fixed through either glasses or contacts, which refract the light coming out of one’s eye to make it look more normal, or laser eye surgery, which physically changes the shape of the eye so that light intersects at the focal point.

Coming to an end of the post, we want to remind our readers once again, putting physics and biology in completely different categorizes would not be the case anymore. The world has been changing by day and lots of scientific fields are likely to work cooperatively in today’s world. Scientists have created new technologies that both physics and biology could contribute as we mentioned above. Finding these connections are never easy, however, scientists are not going to give up on solving mystery behind physical biology. Now tell us, do you believe physical biology could make the difference?

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