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Biological cells are able to generate intricate structures and respond to external stimuli, sculpting their membrane from within. Simplified biomimetic systems can aid in understanding the principles which govern these shape changes and…
Modern tissue engineering strategies combine living cells and scaffold materials to develop biological substitutes that can restore tissue functions. Both natural and synthetic materials have been fabricated for transplantation of stem…
Material electromagnetic duality symmetry requires a system to have equal electric and magnetic responses. Electromagnetic duality enables technologically important effects like artificial optical activity and zero back-scattering, is a…
External fields can decidedly alter the free energy landscape of soft materials and can be exploited as a powerful tool for the assembly of targeted nanostructures and colloidal materials. Here, we use computer simulations to demonstrate…
Various metallic structures of complex shape, resembling natural objects such as plants, mushrooms, and seashells, were produced when growing nanowires by means of pulsed current electroplating in porous membranes. These structures occur as…
The membrane curvature of cells and intracellular compartments continuously adapts to enable cells to perform vital functions, from cell division to signal trafficking. Understanding how membrane geometry affects these processes in vivo is…
Many types of mammalian cells exert active contractile forces and mechanically deform their elastic substrate, to accomplish biological functions such as cell migration. These substrate deformations provide a mechanism by which cells can…
Hydrogels are crosslinked polymer networks with high water content, widely employed in biomedical applications such as drug delivery, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine. Injectable, depot-forming hydrogels enable sustained…
Starch based scaffolds are considered as promising biomaterials for bone tissue engineering. In this study, a highly porous starch/polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) based nanocomposite scaffold with a gradient pore structure was made by incorporating…
Shape-programmable soft materials that exhibit integrated multifunctional shape manipulations, including reprogrammable, untethered, fast, and reversible shape transformation and locking, are highly desirable for a plethora of applications,…
From multicellular tissues to bacterial colonies, three dimensional cellular structures arise through the interaction of cellular activities and mechanical forces. Simple bacterial communities provide model systems for analyzing such…
Engineering synthetic materials that mimic the remarkable complexity of living organisms is a fundamental challenge in science and technology. We study the spatiotemporal patterns that emerge when an active nematicfilm of microtubules and…
Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…
The rapid worldwide spread of severe viral infections, often involving novel modifications of viruses, poses major challenges to our health care systems. This means that tools that can efficiently and specifically diagnose viruses are much…
While parallel grippers and multi-fingered robotic hands are well developed and commonly used in structured settings, it remains a challenge in robotics to design a highly articulated robotic hand that can be comparable to human hands to…
Molecular motor proteins form the basis of cellular dynamics. Recently, notable efforts have led to the creation of their DNA-based mimics, which can carry out complex nanoscale motion. However, such functional analogues have not yet been…
Current strategies for designing tunable locally resonant metamaterials are based on tuning the stiffness of the resonator; however, this approach presents a major shortcoming as the effective mass density is constant at high frequency.…
Dynamically tunable surface textures offer a powerful route to spatiotemporally regulate surface and interfacial properties, enabling emerging applications ranging from adaptive optics to soft robotic manipulation. However, achieving…
The internal dynamics of active gels, both in artificial (in-vitro) model systems and inside the cytoskeleton of living cells, has been extensively studied by experiments of recent years. These dynamics are probed using tracer particles…
Microgels are soft colloidal particles constituted by cross-linked polymer networks with a high potential for applications. In particular, after adsorption at a fluid interface, interfacial tension provides two-dimensional (2D) confinement…