Symposium & Workshop: Shaking, dripping and drinking: surface-tension phenomena in organismal biology, SICB Annual Meeting, Austin, Texas, January 3-7, 2014

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The symposium and associated workshop at the 2014 Meeting of the Society of Integrative Comparative Biology (SICB) will encourage investigators in organismal biology to understand and employ recent experimental, computational and theoretical advances in flows involving water surfaces. Such flows are both ubiquitous and diverse, involving the drinking of birds and bees, the footprints of whale flukes, the flow of xylem in plants, raindrop impacts on animals, and disease transmission through raindrop impacts. The fundamental physical principles underlying such flows provide a unifying framework to interpret the adaptations of the animals and plants that rely upon them. The symposium will provide a much-needed unifying physical framework to understand surface-tension phenomena in biological systems. The speakers will provide the audience with a broad understanding of successful mathematical and biological techniques used in this area, such as scaling laws, calculus for describing water surfaces, as well as scanning electron microscopy, surface moulding using clay, and high-speed videography. The workshop provides an opportunity for biology students to learn new tools from fluid mechanics. Results will be disseminated through publication of a pair of journal articles. The first article will be a view of the future of the field of capillary biology in Integrative and Comparative Biology, as seen by the expert speakers in the symposium. The second article will be a synopsis of the Visualization Workshop, which will discuss the generation, presentation, and interpretation of flow visualization generated from experiments and simulation. The workshop will focus on the use of visual imagery to transcend the language barriers between biology and the mathematical sciences, and to disseminate science to the public.