Related papers: Solvent constraints for biopolymer folding and evo…
Understanding the behavior of biomolecules such as proteins requires understanding the critical influence of the surrounding fluid (solvent) environment--water with mobile salt ions such as sodium. Unfortunately, for many studies, fully…
There is increasingly more evidence being accumulated for the occurrence of large amounts of organic material in the cosmos, particularly in the form of aromatic compounds. These molecules can be found on the surface of Earth and Mars, in…
Polymer behavior in mixed solvents often exhibits intriguing phenomena, such as cosolvency, where a polymer that collapses in two individually poor solvents becomes soluble in their mixture. In this study, we employ a combination of…
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…
Many models for the origin of life have focused on understanding how evolution can drive the refinement of a preexisting enzyme, such as the evolution of efficient replicase activity. Here we present a model for what was, arguably, an even…
Understanding and predicting polymer solubility in various solvents is critical for applications ranging from recycling to pharmaceutical formulation. This work presents a deep learning framework that predicts polymer solubility, expressed…
The discovery of extrasolar planets is one of the major scientific advances of the last two decades. Hundreds of planets have now been detected and astronomers are beginning to characterise their composition and physical characteristics. To…
The existence of global nonnegative weak solutions is proved for coupled one-dimensional lubrication systems that describe the evolution of nanoscopic bilayer thin polymer films that take account of Navier-slip or no-slip conditions at both…
Research investigating the origins of life usually focuses on exploring possible life-bearing chemistries in the pre-biotic Earth, or else on synthetic approaches. Little work has been done exploring fundamental issues concerning the…
A sheet of glassy polymers placed in a solvent shows swelling behaviors quite different from that of soft polymers (rubbers and gels). (1) Non-Fickian diffusion (called case II diffusion): As solvent permeates into the sample, a sharp front…
Exoplanet habitability is traditionally assessed by comparing a planet's semi-major axis to the location of its host star's "habitable zone," the shell around a star for which Earth-like planets can possess liquid surface water. The Kepler…
Reptation theory has been highly successful in explaining the unusual material properties of entangled polymer solutions. It reduces the complex many-body dynamics to a single-polymer description where each polymer is envisaged to be…
We investigate the linear viscoelasticity of polymer gels produced by the dispersion of gluten proteins in water:ethanol binary mixtures with various ethanol contents, from pure water to 60% v/v ethanol. We show that the complex…
For binary solvent mixtures composed of ions and two kinds of polar solvents, electric double layer near a charged object is strongly affected by not only the binary solvent composition but also nature of solvents such as volume and dipole…
Enhancing the efficiency of water electrolysis, which can be severely impacted by the nucleation and growth of bubbles, is key in the energy transition. In this combined experimental and numerical study, in-situ bubble evolution and…
We systematically explore the self-assembly of semi-flexible polymers in deformable spherical confinement across a wide regime of chain stiffness, contour lengths and packing fractions by means of coarse-grained molecular dynamics…
Material mixing induced by a Rayleigh-Taylor instability occurs ubiquitously in either nature or engineering when a light fluid pushes against a heavy fluid, accompanying with the formation and evolution of chaotic bubbles. Its general…
Theory is presented for the phase stability of mixtures containing nanospheres and non-adsorbing reversible supramolecular polymers. This was made possible by incorporating the depletion thickness and osmotic pressure of reversible…
Particles diffusing near interfaces face anisotropic resistance to motion due to hydrodynamic interactions. While this has been extensively studied near \textit{hard} interfaces since the works of Lorentz and Brenner, our understanding of…
We employ a multiscale approach to model the translocation of biopolymers through nanometer size pores. Our computational scheme combines microscopic Molecular Dynamics (MD) with a mesoscopic Lattice Boltzmann (LB) method for the solvent…