Related papers: Directed aging, memory and Nature's greed
Disordered solids often change their elastic response as they slowly age. Using experiments and simulations, we study how aging disordered planar networks under an applied stress affects their nonlinear elastic response. We are able to…
In regimes where inertia is negligible, the temporal evolution is governed by overdamped dynamics. This limit is particularly relevant in soft-matter contexts, such as polymers, colloidal suspensions, and processes occurring at the cellular…
Localized growth in driven materials is often governed by intermittent failure, yet how a material's history biases failure sites remains poorly understood. Using pause-restart experiments on chemical precipitate membranes, we quantify the…
Many complex and disordered systems fail to reach equilibrium after they have been quenched or perturbed. Instead, they sluggishly relax toward equilibrium at an ever-slowing, history-dependent rate, a process termed physical aging. The…
A large variety of materials, widely encountered both in engineering applications and in the biological realm, are characterised by a non-vanishing internal stress distribution, even in the absence of external deformations or applied…
We study directed random graphs (random graphs whose edges are directed) as they evolve in discrete time by the addition of nodes and edges. For two distinct evolution strategies, one that forces the graph to a condition of near acyclicity…
Although species longevity is subject to a diverse range of selective forces, the mortality curves of a wide variety of organisms are rather similar. We argue that aging and its universal characteristics may have evolved by means of a…
The adaptive and surprising emergent properties of biological materials self-assembled in far-from-equilibrium environments serve as an inspiration for efforts to design nanomaterials and their properties. In particular, controlling the…
Disordered fibrous matrices, formed by the random assembly of fibers, provide the structural framework for many biological systems and biomaterials. Applied deformation modifies the alignment and stress states of constituent fibers, tuning…
We study the elasto-plastic behaviour of materials made of individual (discrete) objects, such as a liquid foam made of bubbles. The evolution of positions and mutual arrangements of individual objects is taken into account through…
Engineered systems are designed to deftly operate under predetermined conditions yet are notoriously fragile when unexpected perturbations arise. In contrast, biological systems operate in a highly flexible manner; learn quickly adequate…
Amorphous materials driven away from equilibrium display a diverse repertoire of complex, history-dependent behaviors. One striking feature is a failure to return to equilibrium after an abrupt change in otherwise static external…
A model is proposed that considers aging and rejuvenation in a soft glassy material as respectively a decrease and an increase in free energy. The aging term is weighted by inverse of characteristic relaxation time suggesting greater…
We investigate the dissipative mechanisms exhibited by creased material sheets when subjected to mechanical loading, which comes in the form of plasticity and relaxation phenomena within the creases. After demonstrating that plasticity…
The evolutionary biology of aging is fundamental to understanding the mechanisms of aging and how to develop anti-aging treatments. Thus far most evolutionary theory concerns the genetics of aging with limited physiological integration.…
Robustness, the insensitivity of some of a biological system's functionalities to a set of distinct conditions, is intimately linked to fitness. Recent studies suggest that it may also play a vital role in enabling the evolution of species.…
Evolution in time-varying environments naturally leads to adaptable biological systems that can easily switch functionalities. Advances in the synthesis of environmentally-responsive materials therefore open up the possibility of creating a…
In densely-packed two-dimensional systems of growing cells, such as rod-shaped bacteria, a number of experimental and numerical studies report distinct patterns of nematic orientational order in the presence of confinement. So far, these…
Elastic metamaterials are often designed for a single permanent function. We explore the possibility of altering a material's function repeatedly through a self-organization, "training" process, controlled by applied strains. We show that…
By training linear physical networks to learn linear transformations, we discern how their physical properties evolve due to weight update rules. Our findings highlight a striking similarity between the learning behaviors of such networks…