Related papers: Spider silks mechanics: predicting humidity and te…
The spider silk is one of the most interesting bio-materials investigated in the last years. One of the main reasons that brought scientists to study this organized system is its high level of resistance if compared to other artificial…
Spider dragline silk supercontracts as humidity increases, displaying large axial shortening together with a reproducible macroscopic twist. The physical origin of this torsion remains debated and is often attributed to helically arranged…
In this letter, we adopt a new approach combining theoretical modeling with silk stretching measurements to explore the mystery of the structures between silkworm and spider silks, leading to the differences in mechanical response against…
Spider silk is a remarkable biomaterial with exceptional stiffness, strength, and toughness stemming from a unique microstructure. While recent studies show that silk fibers exhibit plasticity, hysteresis, and recovery under cyclic loading,…
Spider silk is a remarkable example of bio-material with superior mechanical characteristics. Its multilevel structural organization of dragline and viscid silk leads to unusual and tunable properties, extensively studied from a…
When humidified at different moisture conditions, restrained spider silk fibers can exhibit a very high supercontraction phenomenon. The hydration water molecules induce a Hydrogen-bonds disruption process that, due to entropic effects,…
We introduce a new measure of the structure of a liquid which is the softness of the mean-field potential developed by us earlier. We find that this softness is sensitive to small changes in the structure. We then study its correlation with…
Spider capture silk is a biomaterial with both high strength and high elasticity, but the structural design principle underlying these remarkable properties is still unknown. It was revealed recently by atomic force microscopy that, an…
From pasta to biological tissues to contact lenses, gel and gel-like materials inherently soften as they swell with water. In dry, low-relative-humidity environments, these materials stiffen as they de-swell with water. Here, we use…
We propose a model for the mechanical behavior of protein materials. Based on a limited number of experimental macromolecular parameters (persistence and contour lengths, rate of unfolding dissipation) we obtain the macroscopic behavior of…
Microgels are soft colloids that, in virtue of their polymeric nature, can react to external stimuli such as temperature or pH by changing their size. The resulting swelling/deswelling transition can be exploited in fundamental research as…
Adaptive response to a varying environment is a common feature of biological organisms. Reproducing such features in electronic systems and circuits is of great importance for a variety of applications. Here, we consider memory models…
The dynamics of supercooled liquids slow down and become increasingly heterogeneous as they are cooled. Recently, local structural variables identified using machine learning, such as "softness", have emerged as predictors of local…
Spider silk possesses unique mechanical properties like large extensibility, high tensile strength, super-contractility, etc. Understanding these mechanical responses require characterization of the rheological properties of silk beyond the…
An essential element in the web-trap architecture, the capture silk spun by ecribellate orb spiders consists of glue droplets sitting astride a silk filament. Mechanically this thread presents a mixed solid-liquid behavior unknown to date.…
Thousands of plant and animal species have been observed to have superhydrophobic surfaces that lead to various novel behaviors [1-5]. These observations have inspired attempts to create artificial superhydrophobic surfaces, given such…
Data-driven approaches to inferring the local structures responsible for plasticity in amorphous materials have made substantial contributions to our understanding of the failure, flow, and rearrangement dynamics of supercooled fluids. Some…
The remarkable mechanical properties of spider silk, including its tensile strength and extensibility, are primarily governed by the repetitive regions of the proteins that constitute the fiber, the major ampullate spidroins (MaSps).…
Spider silk is biocompatible, biodegradable, and rivals some of the best synthetic materials in terms of strength and toughness. Despite extensive research, comprehensive experimental evidence of the formation and morphology of its internal…
Multiscale phenomena exhibit complex structure-function relationships, and predicting their macroscopic behavior requires deducing differential equations at different scales. The complexity of these equations and the number of essential…