The following is an unedited version of two short articles that are forthcoming in Nature Chemical Engineering. Inspired by Purcell's classic lecture "Life at low Reynolds number", I discuss how scaling arguments, dimensional analysis, and fundamental concepts from chemical engineering science can be used to quantitatively describe microbial swimming -- thereby helping to better understand biological systems and inspiring new engineering advances in turn.
Categories: physics.bio-ph cond-mat.soft cond-mat.stat-mech q-bio.CB q-bio.PE