Disturbing the Balance – Woody Allen Reads Dostoyevsky

Mitotic Spindle: Disturbing a Subtle Balance

Mitotic spindles maintain a roughly constant length in metaphase, so the forces between the spindle poles are balanced. A new study involving screening molecules believed to mediate this force balance has found that spindle length is relatively insensitive to perturbations of molecular motor force-generating activities, but more sensitive to perturbation of microtubule assembly regulators and c...

Darwin and Dostoyevsky: twins.

late in the nineteenth century, charles Darwin (1809–1882) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) published accounts of their investigation of humankind. Darwin did so in 1871 in his book The Descent of Man, Dostoyevsky in 1880 in the parable of The Grand Inquisitor in his book The Brothers Karamazov. last year we celebrated Darwin’s anniversary; for biologists, 2010—the 130th anniversary of Dostoy...

From Dostoyevsky to Brenner

Y. H. BRENNER (1881-1921) has long been associated with the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century. His early letters express fascination with Russian novelists, poets, and critics (Brenner, 1967, pp. 218-226), and the figures of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky appear many times in both his fiction and non-fiction writing. Brenner's admiration for the depth of Dostoyevsky's psychological portr...

Changes in stem diameter of herbaceous and woody plants as a measure of internal water balance

Disturbing the Black Hole

I describe some examples in support of the conjecture that the horizon area of a near equilibrium black hole is an adiabatic invariant. These include a Schwarzschild black hole perturbed by quasistatic scalar fields (which may be minimally or nonminimally coupled to curvature), a Kerr black under the influence of scalar radiation at the superradiance treshold, and a Reissner–Nordström black hol...