What We Are Reading Today: ‘Random Walks in Biology’

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Updated 12 December 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Random Walks in Biology’

  • Howard Berg offers an essential foundation for understanding random motions of molecules, subcellular particles, and cells as well as the processes that are affected by such motions

Author: HOWARD C. BERG 

“Random Walks in Biology” provides a lucid, straightforward introduction to the concepts and techniques of statistical physics that students of biology, biochemistry, and biophysics must know.

Howard Berg offers an essential foundation for understanding random motions of molecules, subcellular particles, and cells as well as the processes that are affected by such motions.

Using the concept of “random walks” of individual particles, Berg illuminates the physics involved in diffusion, sedimentation, electrophoresis, chromatography, and cell motility.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘On Pedantry’ by Arnoud S. Q. Visser

Updated 13 January 2026
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘On Pedantry’ by Arnoud S. Q. Visser

Intellectuals have long provoked scorn and irritation, even downright aggression. Many learned individuals have cast such hostility as a badge of honor, a sign of envy, or a form of resistance to inconvenient truths.

“On Pedantry” offers an altogether different perspective, revealing how the excessive use of learning has been a vice in Western culture since the days of Socrates.

Taking readers  from the academies of ancient Greece to today’s culture wars, Arnoud Visser explains why pretentious and punctilious learning has always annoyed us.