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Cast Away with Tom Hanks: the symbolism of Wilson, the rope, time, and isolation are worth deep reflection. View in LinkedIn

MULTIPLE CONTEXTUAL ROLES. “Conversely, microbes that are usually pathogenic can end up protecting their host against more virulent parasites. Virulence itself, which refers to the degree of damage a pathogen is capable of inflicting on its host, is not a permanent property of the pathogen; it is arguably not even a property of the pathogen, but rather the outcome of a specific kind of interaction between the pathogen and its host.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

SYMBIOTIC SHIFT. “The traditional question ‘Is this microbe a pathogen?’ is gradually giving way to the question ‘Under what ecological conditions is this microbe likely to become a pathogen?’. This shift is partly being prompted by the discovery that microbes thought to be engaged in commensal or mutualistic relations with their host can become pathogenic (i.e. parasitic) as a result of changes in the host environment (this is the case for the microbes that make up the normal microbiota of the human gut, for instance).’ https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

TURBULENCE. “In inhomogeneous mixing, one imagines the dry air saturating through the rapid evaporation of droplets on the edge of an air parcel, before the dry air that is being mixed throughout the parcel has time to mix throughout the parcel. In the homogeneous mixing limit unsaturated air can be mixed throughout the parcel before the droplets have time to adjust.” http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/fileadmin/staff/stevensbjorn/teaching/skript-5.pdf View in LinkedIn

CONTEXTUAL PATHOGENS. “Pathogenicity may not be an intrinsic property of a microbe at all, but rather, as Méthot and Alizon (2015) argue, a contingent property afforded by the particular ecological context in which the microbe finds itself and by the complex and ever changing symbiotic relationship it maintains with its host.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

"TURBULENT MIXING dilutes the concentration of droplets, thereby reducing the competition for the available vapor, and enhancing the growth rate of favored droplets. Thermodynamically the mixing of sub-saturated air requires net evaporation, either by reducing the number of droplets in the saturated air after the mixing, or by reducing the size of the droplets." (Inhomogeneous mixing). http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/fileadmin/staff/stevensbjorn/teaching/skript-5.pdf View in LinkedIn

The fascinating stories of walls. View in LinkedIn

TURBULENCE AND CLOUD SHAPES. "Turbulence is thought to modify the collision efficiency of droplets in one of three ways: 1. By modifying the flow field around the droplets; 2. By generating spatial inhomogeneities in the droplet concentration field; 3. By modifying (generally increasing) the relative velocities between droplets." http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/fileadmin/staff/stevensbjorn/teaching/skript-5.pdf View in LinkedIn

CONCRETE PATHOGENS. “With the rise of medical microbiology in the late nineteenth century the ontological conception became the dominant theory of disease, and so it has remained, more or less, to the present day. The modern notion of a ‘pathogen’ is clearly derived from it, which accounts for why pathogens have long been considered a discrete category, distinguished from other microbes by their inherent capacity to cause disease in appropriate hosts.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

PLANT VAPOR AND CLOUDS. “Plants emit gases from their leaves and sap, which is one reason why they have distinctive smells. When those gases interact with sunlight, their chemistry changes such that they condense from diffuse gas to liquid droplets less than one micrometer — a thousandth of a millimeter — in size. These droplets then serve as the nucleus of a cloud.” https://lnkd.in/dAd-J4G View in LinkedIn