| This thesis is made up of three distinct projects.; Chapter 2 considers the effect of electrostatics on the stability of a charged membrane. We show that at low ionic strength and high surface charge density, repulsion between membrane charges renders it unstable to the formation of holes. An edge is unstable to modulations with wavelength longer than the Debye screening length. Hence at low ionic strength, membranes will disintegrate into vesicles. We use these results-to interpret experiments on stable holes in red blood cell ghosts.; Chapter 3 discusses cylindrical chemotactic collapse. Under special conditions bacteria excrete an attractant and aggregate. The high density regions initially collapse into cylindrical structures, which subsequently destabilize into spherical aggregates. We present a theoretical description of this process. We show that cylindrical collapse involves a balance in which bacterial attraction and diffusion nearly cancel, leading to corrections to the collapse laws expected from dimensional analysis. The cylinder instability is composed of two stages: Initially, slow modulations to the cylinder develop, which correspond to a variation of the collapse time along the cylinder axis. Ultimately, one point on the cylinder pinches off. At this final stage, a front propagates from the pinch into the remainder of the cylinder. The spacing of the resulting spherical aggregates is determined by the front propagation.; Chapter 4 describes penitentes, columns of snow several meters tall which form on glaciers at high altitudes. They form by reflection of sunlight: depressions in the snow receive more reflected sunlight than the top edges, and therefore melt more quickly. Although this explanation is accepted in the literature, no one has previously formulated a mathematical model of penitente formation. This work models the process, aiming to quantify the ideas in the literature. We describe what size and shape penitentes appear, and how this depends on parameters. This allows prediction of the weather conditions necessary to produce observable structure. Over time, the surface coarsens, leading to a scaling law for penitente size vs. time. We also address how the presence of dirt on a snow or ice surface changes its ablation. |
