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Plasmodium of acellular slime mould Physarum polycephalum exhibits traits of wave-like behaviour. The plasmodium's behaviour can be finely tuned in laboratory experiments by using herbal tablets. A single tablet acts as a fixed attractor:…
Bio-inspired methods can provide efficient solutions to perform autonomous landing for Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). Flying insects such as honeybees perform vertical landings by keeping flow divergence constant. This leads to an exponential…
We investigate the dynamics of \textbf{\textit{Lumbriculus variegatus}} in water-saturated sediment beds to understand limbless locomotion in the benthic zone found at the bottom of lakes and oceans. These slender aquatic worms are observed…
The wake of a body moving across the isopycnals of a strongly stratified fluid is characterized by the presence of an intense jet which, under certain circumstances, may become unstable. To get insight into the phenomenology of this…
The sedimentation of a rigid particle near a wall in a viscous fluid has been studied numerically by many authors, but analytical solutions have been derived only for special cases such as the motion of spherical particles. In this paper…
The intricate wobbling motion of flagellated bacteria, characterized by the periodic precession of the cell body, is a determinant factor in their motility and navigation within complex fluid environments. While well-studied in quiescent…
The acoustofluidic method holds great promise for manipulating microorganisms. When exposed to the steady vortex structures of acoustic streaming flow, these microorganisms exhibit intriguing dynamic behaviors, such as hydrodynamic trapping…
The growth dynamics of an air finger injected in a visco-elastic gel (a PVA/borax aqueous solution) is studied in a linear Hele-Shaw cell. Besides the standard Saffmann-Taylor instability, we observe - with increasing finger velocities -…
Stick-slip motion, a common phenomenon observed during crawling of cells, is found to be strongly sensitive to the substrate stiffness. Stick-slip behaviours have previously been investigated typically using purely elastic substrates. For a…
Jellyfish - majestic, energy efficient, and one of the oldest species that inhabits the oceans. It is perhaps the second item, their efficiency, that has captivated scientists for decades into investigating their locomotive behavior. Yet,…
We report an experimental investigation of the spontaneous motion of liquid droplets on soft gels with a crosslinking gradient. By systematically adjusting the spatial difference in crosslinking density, we observed that millimeter-sized…
Droplet deformations caused by substrate vibrations are ubiquitous in nature and highly relevant for applications such as microreactors and single-cell sorting. The vibrations can induce droplet oscillations, a fundamental process that…
Many swimming microorganisms, such as bacteria and sperm, use flexible flagella to move through viscoelastic media in their natural environments. In this paper we address the effects a viscoelastic fluid has on the motion and beating…
On the surface of a vibrating liquid bath, instead of coalescing, a drop will continually bounce on a thin film of air between the drop and the free surface, giving rise to rich chaotic dynamics and quantum analog behavior. However,…
We study experimentally and numerically the onset of tip streaming in an electrified droplet. The experiments show that, for a sufficiently small dimensionless conductivity, the droplet apex oscillates before ejecting a liquid jet. This…
The swimming of an assembly of rigid spheres immersed in a viscous fluid of infinite extent is studied in low Reynolds number hydrodynamics. The instantaneous swimming velocity and rate of dissipation are expressed in terms of the…
There is a recent surge of interest in the behavior of active particles that can at the same time align their direction of movement and synchronize their oscillations, known as swarmalators. While theoretical and numerical models of such…
Motivated by strategies for targeted microfluidic transport of droplets, we investigate how sessile droplets can be steered toward a preferred direction using travelling waves in substrate wettability or deformations of the substrate. To…
Many microorganisms propel through complex media by deformations of their flagella. The beat is thought to emerge from interactions between forces of the surrounding fluid, passive elastic response from deformations of the flagellum, and…
Many biological microorganisms and artificial microswimmers react to external cues of environmental gradients by changing their swimming directions. We study here the behavior of eukarytic flagellated microswimmers in linear viscosity…