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Using shear wave elastography, we measure the changes in the wave speed with the stress produced by a striated muscle during isometric voluntary contraction. To isolate the behaviour of an individual muscle from complementary or…

Based on the physics of stochastic processes we present a new approach for structural health monitoring. We show that the new method allows for an in-situ analysis of the elastic features of a mechanical structure even for realistic…

Multiphase field models have emerged as an important computational tool for understanding biological tissue while resolving single-cell properties. While they have successfully reproduced many experimentally observed behaviors of living…

In this study, we have proposed a new type of tactile sensor that is capable of detecting the stiffness of soft objects. The sensor consists of a brass cylinder with an axial bore. An iron core can easily move inside the bore. Three…

Variable stiffness is a key capability in biological and robotic systems, enabling adaptive interaction across tasks and environments. Mechanical metamaterials offer an alternative to conventional mechatronic solutions by encoding stiffness…

Living tissues experience various external forces on cells, influencing their behaviour, physiology, shape, gene expression, and destiny through interactions with their environment. Despite much research done in this area, challenges remain…

Connecting cell behavior to tissue shape and mechanics is a key challenge in the physics of morphogenesis. Cytoskeletal turnover precludes a fixed reference state, and tensions are actively generated independently of strain; so conventional…

Surface-adhesion and stiffness of underlying substrates mediate geometry, mechanics and self-organization of bacterial colonies. Recent studies have qualitatively indicted that stiffness may impact bacterial attachment, yet the variation of…

Inspired by active shape morphing in developing tissues and biomaterials, we investigate two generic mechanochemical models where the deformations of a thin elastic sheet are driven by, and in turn affect, the concentration gradients of a…

Microrheology, the study of fluids on micron length-scales, promises to reveal insights into cellular biology, including mechanical biomarkers of disease and the interplay between biomechanics and cellular function. Here a…

The importance of molecular-scale forces in sculpting biological form and function has been acknowledged for more than a century. Accounting for forces in biology is a problem that lies at the intersection of soft condensed matter physics,…

Modelling of single cellulose fibres is usually performed by assuming homogenous properties, such as strength and Young s modulus, for the whole fibre. Additionally, the inhomogeneity in size and swelling behaviour along the fibre is often…

The mechanical behavior of closed-cell foams in compression is analyzed by means of the finite element simulation of a representative volume element of the microstructure. The digital model of the foam includes the most relevant details of…

We propose a simple mathematical model to describe the mechanical relaxation of cells within a curved epithelial tissue layer represented by an arbitrary curve in two-dimensional space. This model generalises previous one-dimensional models…

We use a biophysical model of a local neuronal circuit to study the implications of synaptic plasticity for the detection of weak sensory stimuli. Networks with fast plastic coupling show behavior consistent with stochastic resonance.…

Living things benefit from exquisite molecular sensitivity in many of their key processes, including DNA replication, transcription and translation, chemical sensing, and morphogenesis. At thermodynamic equilibrium, the basic biophysical…

The study of cells' dynamical properties is essential to a better understanding of several physiological processes. These properties are directly associated with cells' mechanical parameters experimentally achieved through physical stress.…

We have developed a novel scanning probe-based methodology to study cell biomechanics. The time dependence of the force exerted by the cell surface on a scanning probe at constant local deformation has been used to extract local…

Living cells are soft bodies of a characteristic form, but endowed with a capacity for a steady turnover of their structures. Both of these material properties, i.e. recovery of the shape after an external stress has been imposed and…

Epithelial cell layers on soft elastic substrates or pillar arrays are commonly used as model systems for investigating the role of force in tissue growth, maintenance and repair. Here we show analytically that the experimentally observed…