The following PowerPoint file is from the talk which I gave in my research group recently. It is also my understanding and reading notes from a serial of papers by Prof. Udo Seifert, in which he generalized the entropy production on a single trajectory of the small system such as a molecular machine. It mainly addresses three questions:

After I put down the phone, my heart never felt so heavy. I just called my parents in my hometown, Chengdu,  a city with 12 million people, which is just 90 kilometers away from the center of the strong earthquake at a magnitude of 7.9.  It has killed more than 10,000 people so far. The death toll is still rising hour by hour.

Fig. 1 Earthquake map by the United States Geological Survey

The second law of thermodynamics is ubiquitous, which can explain many phenomena from the ink diffusion in the water and the heat conduction from the hot to the cold etc. Or simply put, order is always decreasing in nature. Even an ancient Chinese philosopher, Laozi once said “ It is the nature’s law nature's law to decreases those who have more than they need and increases those who need more than they have. it is not so with man. Man decreases those who need more than they have and increases those who have more than they need”. It seemed that nature always destroys the order and evens out everything in the world. Then how could life maintain its order? Why life is so unique? What are the differences between the matters with life and without? Order is important for life because losing order of life means that the atoms made of life will mix up with others in the universe. It is nothing but death.

When I came to the institute, my collaborator Kay invited me for a dinner in the new town together with his friend Thilo and other guys. The city is wisely divided into two functioning areas, old town and new town. All the ancient buildings like King’s summer palace, women’s church and opera house are in the old town; while the restaurants, bars and other modern buildings are in the new town. Each is in harmony with its environment and cultural atmosphere.

Just back from Prof. Mahir Hussein's seminar. He is really one of best physicist I  have ever met. In past 30 years, he published more than 200 papers in the field of nuclear resonance, laser accelerated particles etc. There are more than 30 papers published in PRL alone. When input his name " M.Hussein" in arXiv.org, you can easily found 95 papers by him.

Recently I saw an animation
named “The inner life of the cell”, which was made by Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Harvard University Biovision. It can be watched online only:

http://aimediaserver.com/studiodaily/harvard/harvard.swf

The 5th European Conference
on Complex System is holding in Dresden, Germany now. This is really
an emerging research area. The multiple para-sessions themselves show
how diverse and multi-disciplined it is. It includes:

• Complex system method

• Cognition

• Networks

• Social system

  
  

The 2-day conference of biophysics in Manchester had just finished recently. It is really a meeting with a tight schedule and lots of new stuffs.

The meeting took place in the new building of multi-decipline biocenter in Manchester University. One interesting speech was given by Prof. Andrew J. Turberfield