Related papers: Order and Chaos: Collective Behavior of Crowded Dr…
Bacteria can spontaneously develop collective motions by aligning their motions in dense systems. Here, we show that bacteria can also respond collectively to an alternating electrical field and form dynamic clusters oscillating at the same…
Biased locomotion is a common feature of microorganisms, but little is known about its impact on self-organisation. Inspired by recent experiments showing a transition to large-scale flows, we study theoretically the dynamics of…
The phenomenon of group motion is common in nature, ranging from the schools of fish, birds and insects, to avalanches, landslides and sand drift. If we treat objects as collectively moving particles, such phenomena can be studied from a…
This paper proposes a general model for synchronized crowding behavior. An order parameter is introduced to quantify the level of synchronization which is shown a function of percentage of agents in reactive state. Further, synchronization…
Mehmet Toner is the Helen Andrus Benedict Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Harvard Medical School, and Harvard - MIT Health Sciences & Technology. Here he describes his labs efforts to advance…
Over the past few decades, the research community has been interested in the study of multi-agent systems and their emerging collective dynamics. These systems are all around us in nature, like bacterial colonies, fish schools, bird flocks,…
Microfluidics-based biochips are soon expected to revolutionize clinical diagnosis, DNA sequencing, and other laboratory procedures involving molecular biology. Most microfluidic biochips are based on the principle of continuous fluid flow…
Recent progress in colloidal science has led to elaborate self-assembled structures whose complexity raises hopes for elaborating new materials. However, the throughputs are extremely low and consequently, the chance to produce materials of…
Gradient-driven diffusion in crowded, multicomponent mixtures is a topic of high interest because of its role in biological processes such as transport in cell membranes. In partially phase-separated solutions, gradient-driven diffusion…
Advances in synthetic biology allow us to engineer bacterial collectives with pre-specified characteristics. However, the behavior of these collectives is difficult to understand, as cellular growth and division as well as extra-cellular…
Self-organization is the generation of order out of local interactions in non-equilibrium [1]. It is deeply connected to all fields of science from physics, chemistry to biology where functional living structures self-assemble[2] and…
We report here a peculiar dynamically ordered state of clustering droplets of a mixture of organic solvent. There droplets are driven by the solutal Marangoni effect on the surface of aqueous surfactant solution. They form temporal ring…
We study the phenomenon of self-assembly of silica micro-spheres on a glass plate during evaporation of the solvent from a colloidal suspension. Our experiments unveil an interesting competition between ordering and compaction in a strongly…
Turing's theory of pattern formation has been used to describe the formation of self-organised periodic patterns in many biological, chemical and physical systems. However, the use of such models is hindered by our inability to predict, in…
Droplets moving in a microfluidic loop device exhibit both periodic and chaotic behaviors based on the inlet droplet spacing. We propose that the periodic behavior is an outcome of a dispersed phase conservation principle. This conservation…
Although the traits emerged in a mass gathering are often non-deliberative, the act of mass impulse may lead to irre- vocable crowd disasters. The two-fold increase of carnage in crowd since the past two decades has spurred significant…
Paul Blainey is professor of Biological Engineering at MIT. In this contribution he describes three microfluidic technologies that he and his team has developed to extend the capability, accessibility, and applications of microfluidics: (1)…
Microtask crowdsourcing is the practice of breaking down an overarching task to be performed into numerous, small, and quick microtasks that are distributed to an unknown, large set of workers. Microtask crowdsourcing has shown potential in…
Our understanding of supercooled liquids and glasses has lagged significantly behind that of simple liquids and crystalline solids. This is in part due to the many possibly relevant degrees of freedom that are present due to the disorder…
We investigate the collective dynamics of self-propelled droplets, confined in a one dimensional micro-fluidic channel. On one hand, neighboring droplets align and form large trains of droplets moving in the same direction. On the other…