Related papers: Fungal architecture
Cost-effective decarbonisation of the built environment is a stepping stone to achieving net-zero carbon emissions since buildings are globally responsible for more than a quarter of global energy-related CO$_2$ emissions. Improving energy…
Natural decomposition of organic matter is essential in food systems, and compost is used worldwide as an organic fermented fertilizer. However, as a feature of the ecosystem, its effects on the animals are poorly understood. Here we show…
Building design directly affects human well-being and carbon emissions, yet generating spatial-functional and energy-compliant floorplans remains manual, costly, and non-scalable. Existing methods produce visually plausible layouts but…
Use of commercial growth chambers for study of biological processes involved in biomass growth and production pose certain limitations on the nature of studies that can be performed in them. Optimization of biomass rearing and production…
In traditional design, shapes are first conceived, and then fabricated. While this decoupling simplifies the design process, it can result in inefficient material usage, especially where off-cut pieces are hard to reuse. The designer, in…
Modern software development is increasingly dependent on components, libraries and frameworks coming from third-party vendors or open-source suppliers and made available through a number of platforms (or forges). This way of writing…
We explore the crystallization in a colloidal monolayer on a structured template starting from a few-particle nucleus. The competition between the substrate structure and that of the growing crystal induces a new crystal growth scenario.…
Reproducibility is an ideal that no researcher would dispute "in the abstract", but when aspirations meet the cold hard reality of the academic grind, reproducibility often "loses out". In this essay, I share some personal experiences…
Short-term survival and an exuberant plunge into building our future are generating a new kind of unintended consequence -- hidden fragility. This is a direct effect of the sophistication and structural complexity of the socio-technical…
Graphene has recently been attracting considerable interest because of its exceptional conductivity, mechanical strength, thermal stability, etc. Graphene-based devices exhibit high potential for applications in flexible electronics,…
Flagellar-driven locomotion plays a critical role in bacterial attachment and colonization of surfaces, contributing to the risks of contamination and infection. Tremendous attempts to uncover the underlying principles governing bacterial…
Soil microbial communities are known to be robust against perturbations such as nutrition inputs, which appears as an obstacle for the soil improvement. On the other hand, its adaptable aspect has been also reported. Here we propose simple…
The long-term sustainability of research software is a critical challenge, as it usually suffers from poor maintainability, lack of adaptability, and eventual obsolescence. This paper proposes a novel approach to addressing this issue by…
The field of structural engineering is vast, spanning areas from the design of new infrastructure to the assessment of existing infrastructure. From the onset, traditional entry-level university courses teach students to analyse structural…
A primary motivation for our research in digital ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. Ecosystems are thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex,…
Fusion energy is at an important inflection point in its development: multiple government agencies and private companies are now planning fusion pilot plants to deliver electricity to the grid in the next decade. However, realizing fusion…
A primary motivation for research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of natural ecosystems. Ecosystems arc thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex, dynamic…
What makes living systems flexible so that they can react quickly and adapt easily to changing environments? This question has not only engaged biologists for decades but is also of great interest to computer scientists and engineers who…
Designing components that can robustly self-assemble into structures with biological complexity is a grand challenge for material science. Proofreading and error correction is required to improve assembly yield beyond equilibrium limits,…
Several abilities of biological systems, such as adaptation to natural environment, or of animals to learn patterns when appropriately trained, are features that are extremely useful, if emulated by electronic circuits, in applications…