Related papers: Architecture and Co-Evolution of Allosteric Materi…

A recently developed treatment of stochastic processes leads to the construction of a potential landscape for the dynamical evolution of complex systems. Since the existence of a potential function in generic settings has been frequently…

The development of accurate constitutive models for materials that undergo path-dependent processes continues to be a complex challenge in computational solid mechanics. Challenges arise both in considering the appropriate model assumptions…

Several experiments have demonstrated the existence of an electro-mechanical effect in many biological tissues and hydrogels, and its actual influence on growth, migration, and pattern formation. Here, to model these interactions and…

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…

Biomimetic scale-covered substrates are architected meta-structures exhibiting fascinating emergent nonlinearities via the geometry of collective scales contacts. In spite of much progress in understanding their elastic nonlinearity, their…

Complex networks encountered in biology are often characterized by significant structural diversity. Whether it be differences in the three-dimensional structure of allosteric proteins, or the variation among the micro-scale structures of…

Recent advances in physics-augmented neural networks have enabled thermodynamically consistent data-driven constitutive modeling of complex inelastic materials. Most existing approaches, however, implicitly adopt a specific thermodynamic…

The question of how a disordered material's microstructure translates into macroscopic mechanical response is central to understanding and designing materials like pastes, foams and metallic glasses. Here, we examine a 2D soft jammed…

The interplay between active matter and its environment is central to understanding emergent behavior in biological and synthetic systems. Here, we show that coupling active nematic flows to small-amplitude deformations of a compliant…

The dynamics of cellular pattern formation is crucial for understanding embryonic development and tissue morphogenesis. Recent studies have shown that human dermal fibroblasts cultured on liquid crystal elastomers can exhibit an increase in…

From the pragmatic to the symbolic, textiles play a prominent role in some of the most demanding yet ubiquitous scenarios, such as covering the complex and dynamic geometries of the human body. Textiles are made by repeated manipulations of…

Jammed soft disks exhibit avalanches of particle rearrangements under quasistatic shear. We follow the avalanches using steepest descent to decompose them into individual localized rearrangements. We characterize the local structural…

The interplay between activity and elasticity often found in active and living systems triggers a plethora of autonomous behaviors ranging from self-assembly and collective motion to actuation. Amongst these, spontaneous self-oscillations…

Chemical communication, response, and feedback are key requirements for the function of adaptive materials with life-like properties. However, how communication on the single cell-level impacts the collective structural, dynamical and…

In many growth processes particles are highly mobile in an active layer at the surface, but are relatively immobile once incorporated in the bulk. We study models in which atoms are allowed to interact, equilibrate, and order on the…

Emergence of new protein structures has proved difficult to trace in nature and engineer in the laboratory. However, one aspect of structure evolution has proved immensely helpful for determining the three-dimensional structure of proteins…

Natural active systems routinely reshape and reorganize their environments through sustained local interactions. Examples of decentralized collective construction are common in nature, e.g., many insects achieve large-scale constructions…

We study a material modeled as a network of nodes connected by edges. Using a discrete approach, we build a nonlinear algebraic system that connects applied forces to internal forces and node positions. The model can describe elasticity,…

Complex morphologies and microstructures that emerge during materials growth and solidification are often determined by both equilibrium and kinetic properties of the interface and their crystalline anisotropies. However limited knowledge…

This article presents a spiking neuroevolutionary system which implements memristors as plastic connections, i.e. whose weights can vary during a trial. The evolutionary design process exploits parameter self-adaptation and variable…