Related papers: Functionality of disorder in muscle mechanics
Natural hard composites like human bone possess a combination of strength and toughness that exceeds that of their constituents and of many engineered composites. This augmentation is attributed to their complex hierarchical structure,…
In this work I have studied the effect of disorder and system size in fiber bundle model with a certain range of stress redistribution. The strength of the bundle as well as the failure abruptness is observed with varying disorder, stress…
Fibrous networks such as collagen are common in physiological systems. One important function of these networks is to provide mechanical stability for cells and tissues. At physiological levels of connectivity, such networks would be…
Collagen is a key structural protein in the human body, which undergoes mineralization during the formation of hard tissues. Earlier studies have described the mechanical behavior of bone at different scales highlighting material features…
Understanding the role of non-equilibrium driving in self-organization is crucial for developing a predictive description of biological systems, yet it is impeded by their complexity. The actin cytoskeleton serves as a paradigm for how…
The actin cytoskeleton is a key component in the machinery of eukaryotic cells, and it selfassembles out of equilibrium into a wide variety of biologically crucial structures. While the molecular mechanisms involved are well characterized,…
Chiral active materials are abundant in nature, including the cytoskeleton with attached motor proteins, rotary clusters of bacteria flagella, and self-spinning starfish embryos. These materials break both time reversal and mirror-image…
Active fluids, such as cytoskeletal filaments, bacterial colonies and epithelial cell layers, exhibit distinctive orientational coherence, often characterized by nematic order and topological defects. By contrast, little is known about…
Self-organized criticality elucidates the conditions under which physical and biological systems tune themselves to the edge of a second-order phase transition, with scale invariance. Motivated by the empirical observation of bimodal…
Ordered, collective motions commonly arise spontaneously in systems of many interacting, active units, ranging from cellular tissues and bacterial colonies to self-propelled colloids and animal flocks. Active phases are especially rich when…
Recent studies in mammalian hearts show that left ventricular wall thickening is an important mechanism for systolic ejection and that during contraction the cardiac muscle develops significant stresses in the muscular cross-fiber…
The hierarchical organization of the brain is a fundamental structural principle, while brain criticality is a leading hypothesis for its collective dynamics. However, the connection between structure and signatures of criticality remains…
A phenomenological description for active bundles of polar filaments is presented. The activity of the bundle results from crosslinks, that induce relative displacements between the aligned filaments. Our generic description is based on…
Recent experiments have exploited elastic instabilities in membranes to create complex patterns. However, the rational design of such structures poses many challenges, as they are products of nonlinear elastic behavior. We pose a simple…
From flocks of birds to biomolecular assemblies, systems in which many individual components independently consume energy to perform mechanical work exhibit a wide array of striking behaviors. Methods to quantify the dynamics of these so…
Cognitive function requires the coordination of neural activity across many scales, from neurons and circuits to large-scale networks. As such, it is unlikely that an explanatory framework focused upon any single scale will yield a…
As we enter the age of designer matter - where objects can morph and change shape on command - what tools do we need to create shape-shifting structures? At the heart of an elastic deformation is the combination of dilation and distortion,…
Immune cells recognize and discriminate antigens through immunological synapses - dynamic intercellular junctions exhibiting highly organized receptor-ligand patterns. While much work has focused on molecular kinetics and passive mechanisms…
It is shown that a compound elastic structure, which displays a dynamic instability, may be designed as the union (or 'fusion') of two structures which are stable when separately analyzed. The compound elastic structure has two degrees of…
Buckling instabilities driven by tissue growth underpin key developmental events such as the folding of the brain. Tissue growth is disordered due to cell-to-cell variability, but the effects of this variability on buckling are unknown.…