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Hypothesis: Bacterial contamination of surfaces poses a major threat to public health. Designing effective antibacterial or self-cleaning surfaces requires understanding how bacteria-laden droplets interact with solid substrates and how…
Surface-adhesion and stiffness of underlying substrates mediate geometry, mechanics and self-organization of bacterial colonies. Recent studies have qualitatively indicted that stiffness may impact bacterial attachment, yet the variation of…
This study reports the fundamental investigation of a novel composite material consisting of MXene (Ti$_3$C$_2$T$_x$) and a stimulus-responsive hydrogel (Poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) - PNIPAAm). In contrast to previously reported integration…
Living systems are made of active materials with microscopic components that work together to perform macroscopic biological tasks. The breakdown of these collective functionalities leads to diseases, which, conversely, could be treated by…
Collective rotations are common in active matter, enhancing cohesion, transport, and mixing. They are typically attributed to chiral non-reciprocal dynamics due to intrinsic particle chirality, torque-generating interactions among units, or…
Motile living organisms routinely probe their surroundings to adapt in ever-evolving environments. Although synthetic microswimmers offer surrogates for self-propelled living entities, they often lack the complex feedback mechanisms that…
Embedded clusters, which are embedded in bulk materials and different from the surroundings in structures, should be common in materials. This paper studies resonance of such clusters. This work is stimulated by a recent experimental…
A variety of complex fluids consist in soft, round objects (foams, emulsions, assemblies of copolymer micelles or of multilamellar vesicles -- also known as onions). Their dense packing induces a slight deviation from their prefered…
We study the segregation of motile semiflexible filaments from a background of similar but non-motile filaments. Our Langevin dynamics simulations reveal a wide range of emergent structures governed by filament flexibility and activity,…
Gravitational effects in colloidal suspensions can be easily turned off by matching the density of the solid microparticles with the one of the surrounding fluid. By studying the motion of catalytic microswimmers with tunable buoyant…
Cellular contractility, migration, and extracellular matrix (ECM) mechanics are critical for a wide range of biological processes including embryonic development, wound healing, tissue morphogenesis, and regeneration. Even though the…
Many motile microorganisms react to environmental light cues with a variety of motility responses guiding cells towards better conditions for survival and growth. The use of spatial light modulators could help to elucidate the mechanisms of…
In living cells, proteins self-assemble into large functional structures based on specific interactions between molecularly complex patches. Due to this complexity, protein self-assembly results from a competition between a large number of…
The bulk behaviour of granular materials is tied to its mesoscale and particle-scale features: strength properties arise from the buildup of various anisotropic structures at the particle-scale induced by grain connectivity (fabric), force…
When objects are packed in a cluster, physical interactions are unavoidable. Such interactions emerge because of the objects geometric features; some of these features promote entanglement, while others create repulsion. When entanglement…
Colloidal particles dispersed in liquid crystals can form new materials with tunable elastic and electro-optic properties. In a periodic `blue phase' host, particles should template into colloidal crystals with potential uses in photonics,…
Growth in confined spaces can drive cellular populations through a jamming transition from a fluid-like state to a solid-like state. Experiments have found that jammed budding yeast populations can build up extreme compressive pressures…
To study the compressional forces exerted by a bundle of living stiff filaments pressing on a surface, akin to the case of an actin bundle in filopodia structures, we have performed particulate Molecular Dynamics simulations of a grafted…
The magnitude of traction forces exerted by living animal cells on their environment is a monotonically increasing and approximately sigmoidal function of the stiffness of the external medium. This observation is rationalized using active…
Living organisms can demonstrate highly adaptable and sophisticated responses using memory resulting from repeated exposure to external conditions or training. However, realizing similar adaptability in mechanical responses in inanimate,…