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Learning natural and diverse behaviors from human motion datasets remains challenging in physics-based character control. Existing conditional adversarial models often suffer from tight and biased embedding distributions where embeddings…

We investigate associative-memory behavior in a reconfigurable particle packing programmed by purely local cyclic driving. The system is a two-dimensional bidisperse Lennard--Jones particle assembly with periodic boundaries evolved under…

The biological membrane, which compartmentalizes the cell and its organelles, exhibit wide variety of macroscopic shapes of varying morphology and topology. A systematic understanding of the relation of membrane shapes to composition,…

Memory can remarkably modify the collective behaviors of active particles. We show that in a micellar fluid, Quincke particles driven by a square-wave electric field exhibit a frequency-dependent memory. Upon increasing the frequency, a…

The rheology of dense amorphous materials under large shear strain is not fully understood, partly due to the difficulty of directly viewing the microscopic details of such materials. We use a colloidal suspension to simulate amorphous…

Complex tissue flows in epithelia are driven by intra- and inter-cellular processes that generate, maintain, and coordinate mechanical forces. There has been growing evidence that cell shape anisotropy, manifested as nematic order, plays an…

Mechanical metamaterials are periodic lattice structures with complex unit cell architectures that can achieve extraordinary mechanical properties beyond the capability of bulk materials. A new class of metamaterials is proposed, whose…

Maxwell lattice metamaterials possess a rich phase space with distinct topological states featuring mechanically polarized edge behaviors and strongly asymmetric acoustic responses. Until now, demonstrations of non-trivial topological…

Metasurfaces advanced the field of optics by reducing the thickness of optical components and merging multiple functionalities into a single layer device. However, this generally comes with a reduction in performance, especially for…

Dense arrays of soft hair-like structures protruding from surfaces in contact with fluids are ubiquitous in living systems. Fluid flows can easily deform these soft hairs which in turn impacts the flow properties. At the microscale, flows…

Self-assembly is one of the crucial mechanisms allowing to design multifunctional materials. Soft hybrid materials contain components of different nature and exhibit competitive interactions which drive self-organisation into structures of…

Life in complex systems, such as cities and organisms, comes to a standstill when global coordination of mass, energy, and information flows is disrupted. Global coordination is no less important in single cells, especially in large oocytes…

Neural computation is associated with the emergence, reconfiguration and dissolution of cell assemblies in the context of varying oscillatory states. Here, we describe the complex spatio-temporal dynamics of cell assemblies through temporal…

Topological states enable robust transport within disorder-rich media through integer invariants inextricably tied to the transmission of light, sound, or electrons. However, the challenge remains to exploit topological protection in a…

Multi-step pathways, constituted of a sequence of reconfigurations, are central to a wide variety of natural and man-made systems. Such pathways autonomously execute in self-guided processes such as protein folding and self-assembly, but…

Active forces occurring within cells can drive crucial biological processes that involve spontaneous organization and shape change, such as cell division. Motivated by recent in vitro experiments of nematic droplets of cytoskeletal…

Mechanical systems can display topological characteristics similar to that of topological insulators. Here we report a large class of topological mechanical systems related to the BDI symmetry class. These are self-assembled chains of rigid…

The macroscopic properties of polymeric fluids are inherited from the material properties of the fibers embedded in the solvent. The behavior of such passive fibers in flow has been of interest in a wide range of systems, including cellular…

Many biological, culinary, and engineering processes lead to the co-encapsulation of several soft particles within a liquid interface. In these situations the particles are bound together by the capillary forces that deform them and…

Solids are rigid, which means that when left undisturbed, their structures are nearly static. It follows that these structures depend on history -- but it is surprising that they hold readable memories of past events. Here we review the…