Related papers: Living mycelium composites discern weights
Biomineralizing organisms are widely noted and extensively studied due to their ability to generate structures exhibiting exceptional crystallographic control. Primarily, it is the organisms, such as sea-urchins or bivalves, that generate…
Grasping, in both biological and engineered mechanisms, can be highly sensitive to the gripper and object morphology, as well as perception, and motion planning. Here we circumvent the need for feedback or precise planning by using an array…
Mechanical metamaterials made of flexible building blocks can exhibit a plethora of extreme mechanical responses, such as negative elastic constants, shape-changes, programmability and memory. To date, dissipation has largely remained…
High-throughput characterization of architected materials across a wide range of length scales enables rapid screening of topologies for engineering applications. Scaled-down specimens manufactured and evaluated in laboratory environments…
The ability of cells to sense and respond to the mechanical properties of their environments is fundamental to a range of cellular behaviours, with substrate stiffness increasingly being found to be a key signalling factor. Although active…
In complex systems, groups of interacting objects may form prevalent and persistent spatiotemporal patterns, which we refer to as motifs. These motifs can exhibit features that reveal how individual objects interact with one another.…
From a purely operational standpoint, the existence of microbes that can grow under extreme conditions, or "extremophiles", leads to the question of how the molecules making up these microbes can maintain both their structure and function.…
Plants monitor their surrounding environment and control their physiological functions by producing an electrical response. We recorded electrical signals from different plants by exposing them to Sodium Chloride (NaCl), Ozone (O3) and…
A wide range of disordered materials, from biological to geological assemblies, feature discrete elements undergoing large shape changes. How significant geometrical variations at the microscopic scale affect the response of the assembly,…
From flocks of birds to biomolecular assemblies, systems in which many individual components independently consume energy to perform mechanical work exhibit a wide array of striking behaviors. Methods to quantify the dynamics of these so…
Ferrogels and magnetic elastomers feature mechanical properties that can be reversibly tuned from outside through magnetic fields. Here we concentrate on the question how their dynamic response can be adjusted. The influence of three…
The fabrication of nanomaterials involves self-ordering processes of functional molecules on inorganic surfaces. To obtain specific molecular arrangements, a common strategy is to equip molecules with functional groups. However, focusing on…
Multivalent particles bind to targets via many independent ligand-receptor bonding interactions. This microscopic design spans length scales in both synthetic and biological systems. Classic examples include interactions between cells,…
Structural cellular materials in nature, such as wood, trabecular bone, corals, and dentin combine complex biological functions with structural roles, such as skeletal support and impact protection1,2. They feature complex structural…
The capability to sense and respond to external mechanical stimuli at various timescales is essential to many physiological aspects in plants, including self-protection, intake of nutrients, and reproduction. Remarkably, some plants have…
Nature uses elongated shapes and filaments to build stable structures, generate motion, and allow complex geometric interactions. In this Review, we examine the role of biological filaments across different length scales. From the molecular…
The technological and economic benefits of engineered nanomaterials may be offset by their adverse effects on living organisms. One of the highly produced nanomaterials under such scrutiny is amorphous silica nanoparticles, which are known…
Plants sense their environment by producing electrical signals which in essence represent changes in underlying physiological processes. These electrical signals, when monitored, show both stochastic and deterministic dynamics. In this…
We extend our earlier work on the compositional structure of cybernetic systems in order to account for the embodiment of such systems. All their interactions proceed through their bodies' boundaries: sensations impinge on their surfaces,…
The cell wall serves as a mechanical protection for the fungi and controls the traffic of molecules entering the cell. However, the optical role of the cell wall has not been fully investigated. In this work, we use a computational…