When I was young, I dug up potatoes and picked tomatoes for a friend of my grandfather's. The old farmer would sometimes say "there's always something more to learn about tomatoes." He'd talk to everyone he knew about tomatoes. Occasionally, someone actually did have something to say about tomatoes. For a hilarious fictionalized version of this true story, check out this youtube clip (In an effort to at least keep up the appearance of professionalism, I won't embed the video here...)

This apparently boring tale was brought to the surface of my memory by an editorial in this week's Nature, "More than lip service," (subscription) which offers a few insights on biologists working with physicists and the increasing demand for such research. The last paragraph reads:

If cell biologists are truly to engage physicists and vice versa, a better sense that both are in this ride together is necessary. The papers mentioned above involve exploring physical forces acting on a cellular scale. Marrying those measurable physical forces to cellular chemistry in a meaningful way promises to push biology far beyond today's biochemistry. It is a challenge that could engage research for decades. And physics, in particular, is needed more than ever.

The papers that the article refers to as "papers mentioned above" include this one on experiments on the structure single biomolecules, among others. It's reassuring that biologists and physicists realize the importance of what is actually happening down there in the tiny world of cell physiology.

It's exciting to hope that one day the physics of a living cell will be so well understood that it could be modeled by a collection of microfluidic devices and MEMS. As biology comes closer to understanding what's going on and physics comes closer to reproducing what's going on, all of science is coming closer to an extraordinary breakthrough. These artificial cells might one day replace damaged blood or brain cells to help treat diseases such as sickle cell anemia or Alzheimer's. It may be cliché to say, but the possibilities are endless.

I think there's a point too, where insight offered by economists, epidemiologists, and statisticians could become useful to researchers as well.

The future of nanomachines might rest on what the janitor observes when he takes out the garbage (maybe it's attacking him?), or the future of tomato crops everywhere could depend on an idea from a farmer in rural Ohio. Scientists can't be so arrogant to think that a farmer couldn't teach him or her something new about how a tomato grows.

To be clear, I'll not be talking about champagne, soap, or the late-Hawaiian-singer Don Ho.

Wired's blogger Aaron Rowe wrote about some nifty videos of bubbles swimming through microfluids in this article. Rowe compares the videos to Bubble Bobble and Pac Man, bringing new personality to these physicists' work. The article is just one of several decent pieces of correspondence from the 3^rd International Conference on Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore.

This article from Science is a bit older (from February), but I really wanted to discuss bubbles, so I dug up the link. The authors build AND/OR gates, timers, flip-flops, modulators, and oscillators using bubbles as "bits." Calculations are performed while the microdroplets flow through etched channels. I did something like this when I was a kid: I spelled out messages with alphabet cereal and passed the bowl to my sister. After satisfying her curiosity as to what I had "written" (which I’m sure was a critical communication), she got to satisfy her hunger. Ok, so that's not exactly how this "bubble logic" works. It seems like the authors use a two-phase liquid, so the phase represents the binary state of a bit. At least, that's what I think happens.

Still, you could transfer matter and information simultaneously on a micrometer-scale. If you encode a message in bubble-bits and send it across a microtubule, and the message is intercepted by a third party, either matter or information will be missing, and the receiver of the message will know the message was intercepted. Creating a well encrypted bubble message. Are the authors dreaming of voting machines that run on bubble logic?

Regardless, if binary information can be gleaned from this combination of "chemistry and computation," I think someone should go ahead and make a bubble bit version of Bubble Bobble.

When transporting ourselves from one place to another, it's to our advantage to switch paths—whether it be to a connecting train or by leaving the highway an exit early to avoid a snail race through construction. It would be nice if we could take every path at once, exploring each exit and unpaved road for secret shortcuts. If only we lived as light in the strange world of quantum electrodynamics. I would find the quickest way to work every day. Added bonus: the commute would only take a few hundred microseconds.

The quantum world's mysterious effects sometimes pop up in applied physics; I'm glad there are physicists who are working on these kinds of ideas. Scottish researchers Ulf Leonhardt and Thomas Philbin have theorized that by "reversing" the Casimir force—a result of what Albert Einstein and Otto Stern called "zero-point field energy"—they will be able to levitate a 500-nanometer-thick mirror above a conducting plate. The reversal of the attractive Casimir force into a repulsive one is produced by inserting a left-handed material in between the tiny mirror and the conducting plate. Leonhardt and Philbin hope the left-handed material will distort the electromagnetic field and create a zero-point field energy that repels the plates.

It's still theoretical, but the most interesting application of modifying zero-point field energy is in the moving parts of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). If the friction-causing Casimir force could be suppressed in these tiny devices, we would be much closer to the efficient nanomachines Richard Feynman envisioned in 1959.

The authors publish their research in August's New Journal of Physics without an indication of when construction of a levitating device might take place. Apparently, the production and procurement of left-handed materials is the biggest hurdle.

I'd be interested to know what sort of "frictionless" MEMS could be developed. Maybe a frictionless fluid flow system could be developed through a coaxial-cable-like microtube. The fluid would flow where the dielectric insulator of a coax cable is, between two cylindrical plates (the conducting materials in the coax cable) made of left-handed-material-coated conductor on the outside layer and a mirror on the inside layer. Would the microfluid flow without frictional forces, suspended between the plates?

Scaling up this quantum effect isn't feasible, which is unfortunate, because there are a lot of things I'd like to levitate—a car from my house to work, for example.