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We study the spatial rock-paper-scissors model, where resource competitors' cyclic dominance impacts organisms' energy levels. Our model assumes that failed selection interactions can lead to energy loss, reducing the chances of success in…
Innovation and entrepreneurship have a very special role to play in creating sustainable development in the world. Engineering design plays a major role in innovation. These are not new facts. However this added to the fact that in current…
Protein structures in nature often exhibit a high degree of regularity (secondary structures, tertiary symmetries, etc.) absent in random compact conformations. We demonstrate in a simple lattice model of protein folding that structural…
DNA nanostructures with programmable shape and interactions can be used as building blocks for the self-assembly of crystalline materials with prescribed nanoscale features, holding a vast technological potential. Structural rigidity and…
Curvature and mechanics are intimately connected for thin materials, and this coupling between geometry and physical properties is readily seen in folded structures from intestinal villi and pollen grains, to wrinkled membranes and…
Soft materials capable of large inelastic deformation play an essential role in high-performance nacre-inspired architectured materials with a combination of stiffness, strength and toughness. The rigid "building blocks" made from glass or…
The design of adaptive structures is one method to improve sustainability of buildings. Adaptive structures are able to adapt to different loading and environmental conditions or to changing requirements by either small or large shape…
High strength and high toughness are usually mutually exclusive in engineering materials. Improving the toughness of strong but brittle materials like ceramics thus relies on the introduction of a metallic or polymeric ductile phase to…
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…
The adhesive behaviour of biological attachment structures such as spider web anchorages is usually studied using single or multiple peeling models involving "tapes", i.e. one-dimensional contacts elements. This is an oversimplification for…
Through evolution, nature has presented a set of remarkable protein materials, including elastins, silks, keratins and collagens with superior mechanical performances that play crucial roles in mechanobiology. However, going beyond natural…
Biological hydrogels have been increasingly sought after as e.g. wound dressings or scaffolds for regenerative medicine, due to their inherent biofunctionality in biological environments. Especially in moist wound healing, the ideal…
Knitting turns yarn, a 1D material, into a 2D fabric that is flexible, durable [1], and can be patterned to adopt a wide range of 3D geometries [2]. Like other mechanical metamaterials [3], the elasticity of knitted fabrics is an emergent…
Biological cells in soft materials can be modeled as anisotropic force contraction dipoles. The corresponding elastic interaction potentials are long-ranged ($\sim 1/r^3$ with distance $r$) and depend sensitively on elastic constants,…
This work provides a comprehensive overview of the fundamental concepts in continuum mechanics, focusing on the behaviour of materials under mechanical loads. It discusses the distinction between elastic and plastic, highlighting their…
Auxetic materials are a novel class of mechanical metamaterials which exhibit an interesting property of negative Poisson ratio by virtue of their architecture rather than composition. It has been well established that a wide range of…
Imagine a world where beauty and technology move in perfect harmony, revealing tiny masterpieces hidden in the water. This world is Nature, and diatoms are the stars. Masters of assembling complex hierarchical glass structures, these…
All systems are expected to be designed to fulfil their functions over their requested lifetime. Nevertheless, failure of a system may occur, and this is unfortunately, true also for vacuum systems. From a mechanical point of view,…
In many biological materials such as nacre and bone, the material structure consists of hard grains and soft interfaces, with the interfaces playing a significant role in the material's mechanical behavior. This type of structures has been…
Fuel cells, batteries, thermochemical and other energy conversion devices involve the transport of a number of (electro-)chemical species through distinct materials so that they can meet and react at specified multi-material interfaces.…