Related papers: Viewing Earth's surface as a soft matter landscape
A balanced ratio of ocean to land is believed to be essential for an Earth-like biosphere and one may conjecture that plate-tectonics planets should be similar in geological properties. After all, the volume of continental crust evolves…
Exoplanetary science continues to excite and surprise with its rich diversity. We discuss here some key aspects potentially influencing the range of exoplanetary terrestrial-type atmospheres which could exist in nature. We are motivated by…
Humanity has long sought inspiration from nature to innovate materials and devices. As science advances, nature-inspired materials are becoming part of our lives. Animate materials, characterized by their activity, adaptability, and…
Glass is a microscopically disordered, solid form of matter that results when a fluid is cooled or compressed in such a fashion that it does not crystallise. Almost all types of materials are capable of glass formation -- polymers, metal…
Neutral surfaces, along which most of the mixing in the ocean occurs, are notoriously difficult objects: they do not exist as well-defined surfaces, and as such can only be approximated. In a hypothetical ocean where neutral surfaces are…
This paper reviews the new highly interdisciplinary research field studying the behavior of condensed matter systems exposed to radiation. The paper highlights several relevant examples of recent advances in the field and provides a roadmap…
Dust grains play a central role in the physics and chemistry of cosmic environments. They influence the optical and thermal properties of the medium due to their interaction with stellar radiation; provide surfaces for the chemical…
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…
Recently, large models, or foundation models, have exhibited remarkable performance, profoundly impacting research paradigms in diverse domains. Foundation models, trained on extensive and diverse datasets, provide exceptional…
Earth's atmosphere has evolved as volatile species cycle between the atmosphere, ocean, biomass and the solid Earth. The geochemical, biological and astrophysical processes that control atmospheric evolution are reviewed from an "Earth…
Most of the visible matter in the Universe is in a plasma state, or more specifically is composed of ionized or partially ionized gas permeated by magnetic fields. Thanks to recent advances on the theory and detection of cosmic magnetic…
We present the study of the landscape structure of athermal soft spheres both as a function of the packing fraction and of the energy. We find that, on approaching the jamming transition, the number of different configurations available to…
The recent discovery of super-Earths (masses less or equal to 10 earth-masses) has initiated a discussion about conditions for habitable worlds. Among these is the mode of convection, which influences a planet's thermal evolution and…
Friction plays a fundamental role in many natural processes, including earthquakes, landslides, and volcanic eruptions. Earthquakes occur when highly compressed fault surfaces accumulate large enough shear stresses, causing the faults to…
Thin surfaces are ubiquitous in nature, from leaves to cell membranes, and in technology, from paper to corrugated containers. Structural thinness imbues them with flexibility, the ability to easily bend under light loads, even as their…
Active systems are driven out of equilibrium by exchanging energy and momentum with their environment. This endows them with anomalous mechanical properties that we review in this colloquium for the case of dry scalar active matter, which…
Granular materials such as sand, powders, foams etc. are ubiquitous in our daily life, as well as in industrial and geotechnical applications. Although these disordered systems form stable structures if unperturbed, in practice they do…
The arrangements of particles and forces in granular materials have a complex organization on multiple spatial scales that ranges from local structures to mesoscale and system-wide ones. This multiscale organization can affect how a…
It is widely appreciated that surface tension can dominate the behavior of liquids at small scales. Solids also have surface stresses of a similar magnitude, but they are usually overlooked. However, recent work has shown that these can…
Proteins evolve through complex sequence spaces, with fitness landscapes serving as a conceptual framework that links sequence to function. Fitness landscapes can be smooth, where multiple similarly accessible evolutionary paths are…