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We study the capture of a diffusing "lamb" by diffusing "lions" in one dimension. The capture dynamics is exactly soluble by probabilistic techniques when the number of lions is very small, and is tractable by extreme statistics…
We present our recent study on rough adhesive contacts of viscoelastic materials in steady-state sliding, focusing on the interplay between adhesion and viscoelasticity by means of a novel energy approach. We investigate tribological…
The toe pads of frogs consist of soft hexagonal structures and a viscous liquid contained between and within the hexagonal structures. It has been hypothesized that this configuration creates adhesion by allowing for long range capillary…
A model system has been recently developed to study adhesion. It consists of a giant lipid bilayer vesicle with reconstituted lipo-polymers (repellers) as well as with lipo-ligands recognized by receptors covering the substrate. Adhesion in…
We propose a minimal model of predator-swarm interactions which captures many of the essential dynamics observed in nature. Different outcomes are observed depending on the predator strength. For a "weak" predator, the swarm is able to…
Swarming behaviors in animals have been extensively studied due to their implications for the evolution of cooperation, social cognition, and predator-prey dynamics. An important goal of these studies is discerning which evolutionary…
Understanding cellular response to mechanical forces is immensely important for a plethora of biological processes. Focal adhesions are multi-molecular protein assemblies that connect the cell to the extracellular matrix and play a pivotal…
Insects, pick-and-place manufacturing, engineered adhesives, and soft robots employ soft materials to stick to surfaces even in the presence of roughness. Experiments show that the force required for making contact is lower than for…
Animal morphogenesis involves complex tissue deformation processes, which require tight control over tissue rheology. Yet, it remains insufficiently understood how tissue rheology results from the interplay between cellular packing and…
Surface roughness is known to easily suppress the adhesion of elastic surfaces. Here a simple model for the contact of \emph{viscoelastic} rough surfaces with significant levels of adhesion is presented. This approach is derived from our…
We introduce two 2D mechanical models reproducing the evolution of two viscous tissues in contact. Their main property is to model the swirling cell motions while keeping the tissues segregated, as observed during vertebrate embryo…
A common idiom in biology education states, "Eyes in the front, the animal hunts. Eyes on the side, the animal hides." In this paper, we explore one possible explanation for why predators tend to have forward-facing, high-acuity visual…
The friction and adhesion between elastic bodies are strongly influenced by the roughness of the surfaces in contact. Here we develop a multiscale molecular dynamics approach to contact mechanics, which can be used also when the surfaces…
Camouflage in nature seems to arise from competition between predator and prey. To survive, predators must find prey, and prey must avoid being found. This work simulates an abstract model of that adversarial relationship. It looks at…
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,…
Recently, a simple and elegant "dimple" model was introduced by McMeeking et al. (Adv Eng Mat 12(5), 389-397, 2010) to show a mechanism for a bistable adhesive system involving a surface with a shallow depression. The system shows, at least…
Training large language models faces frequent interruptions due to various faults, demanding robust fault-tolerance. Existing backup-free methods, such as redundant computation, dynamic parallelism, and data rerouting, each incur…
The adhesion of biomembranes is mediated by the binding of membrane-anchored receptor and ligand proteins. The proteins can only bind if the separation between apposing membranes is sufficiently close to the length of the protein complexes,…
The adhesive behaviour of biological attachment structures such as spider web anchorages is usually studied using single or multiple peeling models involving "tapes", i.e. one-dimensional contacts elements. This is an oversimplification for…
Lizards and insects can strongly attach to walls and then detach applying negligible additional forces. We propose a simple mechanical model of this phenomenon which implies active muscle control. We show that the detachment force may…