Related papers: Directed aging, memory and Nature's greed
Many organisms exhibit branching morphologies that twist around each other and become entangled. Entanglement occurs when different objects interlock, creating complex and often irreversible configurations. This physical phenomenon is…
Neural prediction offers a promising approach to forecasting the individual variability of neurocognitive functions and disorders and providing prognostic indicators for personalized invention. However, it is challenging to translate neural…
A key process during animal morphogenesis is oriented tissue deformation, which is often driven by internally generated active stresses. Yet, such active oriented materials are prone to well-known instabilities, raising the question of how…
Using the mechanics of creep in material sciences as a metaphor, we present a general framework to understand the evolution of financial, economic and social systems and to construct scenarios for the future. In a nutshell, highly…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
Slow relaxation occurs in many physical and biological systems. `Creep' is an example from everyday life: when stretching a rubber band, for example, the recovery to its equilibrium length is not, as one might think, exponential: the…
A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…
When materials are loaded below their short-term strength over extended periods, a slow time-dependent process known as creep deformation takes place. During creep deformation, the structural properties of a material evolve as a function of…
High-density granular active matter is a useful model for dense animal collectives and could be useful for designing reconfigurable materials that can flow or solidify on command. Recent work has demonstrated key similarities and…
The evolution of various competing cell types in tissues, and the resulting persistent tissue population, is studied numerically and analytically in a particle-based model of active tissues. Mutations change the properties of cells in…
Odd elasticity describes the unusual elastic response of solids whose stress-strain relationship is not compatible with an elastic potential. Here, we present a study of odd elasticity in a driven granular matter system composed of grains…
Unlike most synthetic materials, biological materials often stiffen as they are deformed. This nonlinear elastic response, critical for the physiological function of some tissues, has been documented since at least the 19th century, but the…
Active materials take advantage of their internal sources of energy to self-organize in an automated manner. This feature provides a novel opportunity to design micron-scale machines with minimal required control. However, self-organization…
Fitness consequence of dispersal depends on property of the entire landscape, which patches are available and what are the cost of moving. These are information that are not available locally when an organism make the decision to disperse.…
Molecular dynamics simulations are used to investigate the effects of deformation on the segmental dynamics in an aging polymer glass. Individual particle trajectories are decomposed into a series of discontinuous hops, from which we obtain…
Entangled states are ubiquitous amongst fibrous materials, whether naturally occurring (keratin, collagen, DNA) or synthetic (nanotube assemblies, elastane). A key mechanical characteristic of these systems is their ability to reorganise in…
Biological evolution continuously refines the design of species, resulting in highly optimised organisms over hundreds of millennia. Intuitively, we expect that random changes-evolution's primary mechanism-are more likely to be harmful than…
Using linearized elasticity as a convenient mechanical framework, we show that volumetric growth can be formulated as an optimization-driven process in which the growth tensor is determined implicitly by constrained optimization rather than…
Evolution of the energy landscape during physical aging of glassy materials can be understood from the frequency and strain dependence of the shear modulus but the non-stationary nature of these systems frustrates investigation of their…
The yielding of disordered materials is a complex transition involving significant changes of the material's microstructure and dynamics. After yielding, many soft materials recover their quiescent properties over time as they age. There…