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Rapid progress in additive manufacturing methods has created a new class of ultralight and strong architected metamaterials that resemble periodic truss structures. The mechanical performance of these metamaterials with a very large number…
Mechanical forces influence the dynamics of growing tissues. Computer simulations are employed to study the importance of interfacial effects in tissue competition. It was speculated that mechanical pressure determines the competition,…
Ecological trade-offs between species are often invoked to explain species coexistence in ecological communities. However, few mathematical models have been proposed for which coexistence conditions can be characterized explicitly in terms…
We present a generic framework for modelling three-dimensional deformable shells of active matter that captures the orientational dynamics of the active particles and hydrodynamic interactions on the shell and with the surrounding…
Proteins, by virtue of their central role in most biological processes, represent one of the key subjects of the study of molecular evolution. Inherent to the indispensability of proteins for living cells is the fact that a given protein…
Proteins are an example of heteropolymers able to self-assemble in specific target structures. The self-assembly of designed artificial heteropolymers is still, to the best of our knowledge, not possible with control over the single chain…
Numerical modeling of strength and non-destructive testing of complex structures such as buildings, space rockets or oil reservoirs often involves calculations on extremely large grids. The modeling of elastic wave processes in solids…
In a complex system, the individual components are neither so tightly coupled or correlated that they can all be treated as a single unit, nor so uncorrelated that they can be approximated as independent entities. Instead, patterns of…
Much of our understanding of ecological and evolutionary mechanisms derives from analysis of low-dimensional models: with few interacting species, or few axes defining "fitness". It is not always clear to what extent the intuition derived…
Multivalent particles have the ability to form multiple bonds to a substrate. Hence, a multivalent interaction can be strong, even if the individual bonds are weak. However, much more interestingly, multivalency greatly increases the…
Biological synaptic transmission is unreliable, and this unreliability likely degrades neural circuit performance. While there are biophysical mechanisms that can increase reliability, for instance by increasing vesicle release probability,…
Structures with artificial mechanical properties, often called mechanical metamaterials, exhibit divergent yet tunable performance. Various types of mechanical metamaterials have been proposed, which harness light or magnetic interactions,…
Speciation is driven by many different factors. Among those are trade-offs between different ways an organism utilizes resources, and these trade-offs can constrain the manner in which selection can optimize traits. Limited migration among…
The trade-offs between different mechanical properties of materials pose fundamental challenges in engineering material design, such as balancing stiffness versus toughness, weight versus energy-absorbing capacity, and among the various…
The networks of predator-prey interactions in ecological systems are remarkably complex, but nevertheless surprisingly stable in terms of long term persistence of the system as a whole. In order to understand the mechanism driving the…
Engineering new molecules with desirable functions and properties has the potential to extend our ability to engineer proteins beyond what nature has so far evolved. Advances in the so-called "de novo" design problem have recently been…
The sensitivity of the native states of protein-like heteropolymers to mutations modelled as perturbations in the interaction potential between amino acids is studied. The stability threshold against mutations is shown to be zero for random…
Cutting-edge smart materials are transforming the domains of soft robotics, actuators, and sensors by harnessing diverse non-mechanical stimuli, such as electric and magnetic fields. Accurately modelling their physical behaviour…
Robots are notoriously difficult to design because of complex interdependencies between their physical structure, sensory and motor layouts, and behavior. Despite this, almost every detail of every robot built to date has been manually…
Quantitative topological analogies between the flexibilities of optimized inorganic glasses, small biological molecules, and proteins suggest that mean field estimates of internal stress are useful in identifying mechanisms supporting…