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Title: The World's Smallest Swimmers

Jerry Gollub

Short Abstract
People are often surprised to learn that many individual biological cells have the capacity to swim in a liquid, and that they can often move many times their own length in a second, despite a fluid environment that looks to them like molasses. Such cells are common, including bacteria, algae, plankton, and others. Some cells with this property of “motility” are included in our bodies, where they serve a variety of functions, including the clearing of mucus from the lungs. In the oceans, swimming cells engulf other cells as prey, and also have the effect of producing mixing of the surrounding water. Understanding swimming cells is a subject for both physics and biology. Physics helps us to understand a world in which there is no coasting: If propulsion stops, a cell will come to rest in only one ten thousandth of a second. Physics also helps us to understand the fluid flows induced by these swimmers, and how they manage to swim using protrusions known as flagella driven by biological motors that are not so different from those that power our muscles. In this talk, I will present some experimental studies of swimming cells only 10 microns in size, using techniques such as fast video microscopy to track tiny particles that are pushed around by the cells. I will show how microorganisms generate the forces that propel them and how they affect the surrounding fluid.