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Metamaterials are engineered materials composed of specially designed unit cells that exhibit extraordinary properties beyond those of natural materials. Complex engineering tasks often require heterogeneous unit cells to accommodate…
The design of a biodegradable, environmentally friendly surfactant is carried out, taking the structure of a known surfactant that lacks these qualities as the starting point, using mesoscopic computer simulations. The newly designed…
In this paper, we report a novel experimental and theoretical study to examine the response of a soft capsule bathed in a liquid environment to sudden external impacts. Taking an egg yolk as an example, we found that the soft matter is not…
The rise of soft materials and additive manufacturing has provided the feasibility of developing elastomer lattices for various engineering applications. Although earlier attempts have been made to manufacture and test the elastomer…
Proteins are sequences of amino acids that serve as the basic building blocks of living organisms. Despite rapidly growing databases documenting structural and functional information for various protein sequences, our understanding of…
Open-ended evolutionary dynamics remains an elusive goal for artificial evolutionary systems. Many ideas exist in the biological literature beyond the basic Darwinian requirements of variation, differential reproduction and inheritance. I…
Biological lifeforms can heal, grow, adapt, and reproduce -- abilities essential for sustained survival and development. In contrast, robots today are primarily monolithic machines with limited ability to self-repair, physically develop, or…
Emergence is a phenomenon taken for granted in science but also still not well understood. We have developed a model of artificial genetic evolution intended to allow for emergence on genetic, population and social levels. We present the…
Variable stiffness is a key capability in biological and robotic systems, enabling adaptive interaction across tasks and environments. Mechanical metamaterials offer an alternative to conventional mechatronic solutions by encoding stiffness…
Critically elastic materials - those that are rigid with a single state of self-stress - can be generated from parent systems with two states of self-stress by the removal of one of many constraints. We show that the elastic moduli of the…
The development of tissue-engineered cardiovascular implants can improve the lives of large segments of our society who suffer from cardiovascular diseases. Regenerative tissues are fabricated using a process called tissue maturation.…
Learning from nature has been a quest of humanity for millennia. While this has taken the form of humans assessing natural designs such as bones, butterfly wings, or spider webs, we can now achieve generating designs using advanced…
Soft tissues - such as ligaments and tendons - primarily consist of solid (collagen, predominantly) and liquid phases. Understanding the interaction between such components and how they change under physiological loading sets the basis for…
Energy storage technologies are of great practical importance in electrical grids where renewable energy sources are becoming a significant component in the energy generation mix. Here, we focus on some of the basic properties of flywheel…
Materials that behave like machines, e.g. functional materials that are able to change shape in response to external stimuli (Bhattacharya and James, 2005), often do so by exploiting phase transitions. Shape memory materials and the tail…
The increasing demands of sustainable energy, electronics, and biomedical applications call for next-generation functional materials with unprecedented properties. Of particular interest are emerging materials that display exceptional…
Self-assembly is a fundamental concept in biology and of significant interest to nanotechnology. Significant progress has been made in characterizing and controlling the properties of the resulting structures, both experimentally and…
In Part I of this article we have developed a novel mechanobiological model of a Tissue Engineering process that accounts for the mechanisms through which an isotropic or anisotropic adherence condition regulates the active functions of the…
Emerging multi-material 3D printing techniques have paved the way for the rational design of metamaterials with not only complex geometries but also arbitrary distributions of multiple materials within those geometries. Varying the spatial…
Developing reliable mechanisms for continuous local learning is a central challenge faced by biological and artificial systems. Yet, how the environmental factors and structural constraints on the learning network influence the optimal…