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Insects control unsteady aerodynamic forces on flapping wings to navigate complex environments. While understanding these forces is vital for biology, physics, and engineering, existing evaluation methods face trade-offs: high-fidelity…
Diverse implicit structures of fluids are discovered lately, providing opportunities to study the physics of fluids applying network analysis. Although considerable works devote to identifying informative network structures of fluids, we…
This work describes a novel mechanism of laminar flow control of a backward swept wing with a comb-like leading edge device. It is inspired by the leading-edge comb on owl feathers and the special design of its barbs, resembling a cascade…
Liquid-liquid phase separation is important across biology, physics, and materials science. Although usually studied at equilibrium, active components - such as motor proteins, enzymes, and synthetic microswimmers - are increasingly…
Development, regeneration and cancer involve drastic transitions in tissue morphology. In analogy with the behavior of inert fluids, some of these transitions have been interpreted as wetting transitions. The validity and scope of this…
During the life of animals, epithelial tissues undergo extensive deformations--first to form organs during embryogensis and later to preserve integrity and function in adulthood. To what extent these deformations resemble that of non-living…
The extent to which biological interfaces affect the dynamics of water plays a key role in the exchange of matter and chemical interactions that are essential for life. The density and the mobility of water molecules depend on their…
Lipid bilayer membranes are the fundamental biological barriers that permit life. The bilayer dynamics largely participates in orchestrating cellular workings and is characterized by substantial stability together with extreme plasticity…
A wide range of microorganisms, e.g. bacteria, propel themselves by rotation of soft helical tails, also known as flagella. Due to the small size of these organisms, viscous forces overwhelm inertial effects and the flow is at low Reynolds…
The dynamics of spherical particles driven along an interface between two immiscible fluids is investigated asymptotically. Under the assumptions of a pinned three-phase contact line and very different viscosities of the two fluids, a…
Biomolecules, such as proteins and RNAs, can phase separate in the cytoplasm of cells to form biomolecular condensates. Such condensates are liquid-like droplets that can wet biological surfaces such as membranes. Many molecules that…
Biological adhesion is a critical mechanical function of complex organisms operating at multiple scales. At the cellular scale, cell-cell adhesion is remarkably tunable to enable both cohesion and malleability during development,…
The effect of thermal fluctuations near a contact line of a liquid interface partially wetting an impenetrable substrate is studied analytically and numerically. Promoting both the interface profile and the contact line position to random…
The passive flight of a thin wing or plate is an archetypal problem in flow-structure interactions at intermediate Reynolds numbers. This seemingly simple aerodynamic system displays an impressive variety of steady and unsteady motions that…
An attractive technique for forming and collecting aggregates of magnetic material at a liquid--air interface by an applied magnetic field gradient was recently addressed theoretically and experimentally [Soft Matter, (9) 2013, 8600-8608]:…
We study the roughening of interfaces in phase-separated active suspensions on substrates. At both large length and timescales, we show that the interfacial dynamics belongs to the |q|KPZ universality class discussed in Besse et al. Phys.…
It is widely appreciated that surface tension can dominate the behavior of liquids at small scales. Solids also have surface stresses of a similar magnitude, but they are usually overlooked. However, recent work has shown that these can…
When a fluid flows past a solid surface, its macroscopic motion arises from a subtle interplay between microscopic hydrodynamic and thermodynamic effects at the fluid-solid interface. Classical hydrodynamic models often rely on an…
Measurements of the surface diffusivity of colloidal spheres translating along a vapor/liquid inter- face show an unexpected decrease in diffusivity, or increase in surface drag (from the Stokes-Einstein relation) when the particles situate…
A living cell actively generates traction forces on its environment with its actin cytoskeleton. These forces deform the cell elastic substrate which, in turn, affects the traction forces exerted by the cell and can consequently modify the…