Related papers: Complex fluids in the animal kingdom
Locomotion and transport of microorganisms in fluids is an essential aspect of life. Search for food, orientation toward light, spreading of off-spring, and the formation of colonies are only possible due to locomotion. Swimming at the…
Collective cellular movement plays a crucial role in many processes fundamental to health, including development, reproduction, infection, wound healing, and cancer. The emergent dynamics that arise in these systems are typically thought to…
Interaction with its immediate environment determines the ecology of an organism. Species present in any habitat, wild or urban, may face extreme pressure due to sudden perturbations. When such disturbances are unpredictable, it becomes…
Many bacteria live in natural and clinical environments with abundant macromolecular polymers. Macromolecular fluids commonly display viscoelasticity and non-Newtonian rheological behavior; it is unclear how these complex-fluid properties…
Collective behaviors exhibited by animal groups, such as fish schools, bird flocks, or insect swarms are fascinating examples of self-organization in biology. Concepts and methods from statistical physics have been used to argue…
We consider a predator-prey model of planktonic population dynamics, of excitable character, living in an open and chaotic fluid flow, i.e., a state of fluid motion in which fluid trajectories are unbounded but a chaotic region exists that…
Droplets help organize cells by compartmentalizing biomolecules and by mediating mechanical interactions. When bridging two structures, such droplets generate capillary forces, which depend on surface properties and distance. While the…
We investigate a cyclic game system where organisms face an epidemic beyond being threatened by natural enemies. As a survival strategy, individuals of one out of the species usually safeguard themselves by approaching the enemies of their…
For nearly a century, researchers have tried to understand the swimming of aquatic animals in terms of a balance between the forward thrust from swimming movements and drag on the body. Prior approaches have failed to provide a separation…
Flows are essential to transport resources over large distances. As soon as diffusion becomes time-limiting, flows are needed. Flows are key for the function of multiple human organs, from the blood vasculature to the lungs, the digestive…
The ability of biological and artificial collectives to outperform solitary individuals in a wide variety of tasks depends crucially on the efficient processing of social and environmental information at the level of the collective. Here,…
Explaining how and why some species evolved to have more complex social structures than others has been a long-term goal for many researchers in animal behavior because it would provide important insight into the links between evolution and…
All life, including cells and artificial protocells, must integrate diverse molecules into a single unit in order to reproduce. Despite expected pressure to evolve a simple system with the fastest replication speed, the mechanism by which…
Complex networks have been shown to be robust against random structural perturbations, but vulnerable against targeted attacks. Robustness analysis usually simulates the removal of individual or sets of nodes, followed by the assessment of…
Active biological flow networks pervade nature and span a wide range of scales, from arterial blood vessels and bronchial mucus transport in humans to bacterial flow through porous media or plasmodial shuttle streaming in slime molds.…
Swarms are self-organized dynamical coupled agents which evolve from simple rules of communication. They are ubiquitous in nature, and be- coming more prominent in defense applications. Here we report on a preliminary study of swarm…
Branched flow governs the transition from ballistic to diffusive motion of waves and conservative particle flows in spatially correlated random or complex environments. It occurs in many physical systems from micrometer to interstellar…
Flow networks are fundamental for understanding systems such as animal and plant vasculature or power distribution grids. These networks can encode, transmit, and transform information embodied in the spatial and temporal distribution of…
A robotic swarm that is required to operate for long periods in a potentially unknown environment can use both evolution and individual learning methods in order to adapt. However, the role played by the environment in influencing the…
Almost all investigations of turbulent flows in academia and in the industry utilize some degree of turbulence modeling. Of the available approaches to turbulence modeling Reynolds Stress Models have the highest potential to replicate…