Related papers: Structural hierarchy confers error tolerance in bi…

The principle of hierarchical design is a prominent theme in many natural systems where mechanical efficiency is of importance. Here we establish the properties of a particular hierarchical structure, showing that high mechanical efficiency…

Many biological tissues feature a heterogeneous network of fibers whose tensile and bending rigidity contribute substantially to these tissues' elastic properties. Rigidity percolation has emerged as a important paradigm for relating these…

Nature has engineered complex designs to achieve advanced properties and functionalities through evolution, over millions of years. Many organisms have adapted to their living environment producing extremely efficient materials and…

Interconnected networks describe the dynamics of important systems in a wide range such as biological systems and electrical power grids. Some important features of these systems were successfully studied and understood through simplified…

Hierarchical networks actually have many applications in the real world. Firstly, we propose a new class of hierarchical networks with scale-free and fractal structure, which are the networks with triangles compared to traditional…

Hierarchically designed mechanical metamaterials involve nested levels of structural organization, mimicking natural structures (such as bones, wood, and bird feathers) to create advanced functional materials. Compositional hierarchy, a…

Many sectors nowadays require accurate and coherent predictions across their organization to effectively operate. Otherwise, decision-makers would be planning using disparate views of the future, resulting in inconsistent decisions across…

The recent discovery of universal principles underlying many complex networks occurring across a wide range of length scales in the biological world has spurred physicists in trying to understand such features using techniques from…

Constraints placed upon the phenotypes of organisms result from their interactions with the environment. Over evolutionary timescales, these constraints feed back onto smaller molecular subnetworks comprising the organism. The evolution of…

Functional networks provide a topological description of activity patterns in the brain, as they stem from the propagation of neural activity on the underlying anatomical or structural network of synaptic connections. This latter is well…

Self-assembly in the laboratory can now yield `information-rich' nanostructures in which each component is of a distinct type and has a defined spatial position. Ensuring the thermodynamic stability of such structures requires…

Contact unit size reduction is a widely studied mechanism as a means to improve adhesion in natural fibrillar systems, such as those observed in beetles or geckos. However, these animals also display complex structural features in the way…

Many social and biological systems are characterized by enduring hierarchies, including those organized around prestige in academia, dominance in animal groups, and desirability in online dating. Despite their ubiquity, the general…

Identifying and explaining the structure of complex networks at different scales has become an important problem across disciplines. At the mesoscale, modular architecture has attracted most of the attention. At the macroscale, other…

Networks of elastic fibers are ubiquitous in biological systems and often provide mechanical stability to cells and tissues. Fiber reinforced materials are also common in technology. An important characteristic of such materials is their…

Many real networks in nature and society share two generic properties: they are scale-free and they display a high degree of clustering. We show that these two features are the consequence of a hierarchical organization, implying that small…

Filamentous bio-materials such as fibrin or collagen networks exhibit an enormous stiffening of their elastic moduli upon large deformations. This pronounced nonlinear behavior stems from a significant separation between the stiffnesses…

Rigidity is an emergent property of materials - it is not a feature of individual components that comprise the structure, but instead arises from interactions between many constituent parts. Recently, it has been recognized that…

Networks involved in information processing often have their nodes arranged hierarchically, with the majority of connections occurring in adjacent levels. However, despite being an intuitively appealing concept, the hierarchical…

How can tissues generate large numbers of cells, yet keep the divisional load (the number of divisions along cell lineages) low in order to curtail the accumulation of somatic mutations and reduce the risk of cancer? To answer the question…