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Biopolymer networks from the intracellular to tissue scale display high rigidity and tensile stress while having coordinations well below the normal threshold for mechanical rigidity. The elastic filaments in these networks are often…
Measuring the forces of individual muscles in a muscle group around a joint is non-trivial, and researchers have suggested using surrogates for individual muscle forces instead. Traditionally, experimentalists have shown that the force…
Understanding how the brain learns to compute functions reliably, efficiently and robustly with noisy spiking activity is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. Most sensory and motor tasks can be described as dynamical systems and could…
This work investigates the effects of tangent polar activity on the conformational and dynamic properties of entangled polymer melts through Langevin molecular dynamics simulations. We examine systems composed of all self-propelled,…
Soft slender structures are ubiquitous in natural and artificial systems and can be observed at scales that range from the nanometric to the kilometric, from polymers to space tethers. We present a practical numerical approach to simulate…
Humans possess a remarkable ability to react to unpredictable perturbations through immediate mechanical responses, which harness the visco-elastic properties of muscles to maintain balance. Inspired by this behaviour, we propose a novel…
Deformation due to embedded fluidic networks is currently studied in the context of soft-actuators and soft-robotics. Expanding on this concept, beams can be designed so that the pressure in the channel-network is created directly from…
The mathematical modeling of the contraction of a muscle is a crucial problem in biomechanics. Several different models of muscle activation exist in literature. A possible approach to contractility is the so-called active strain: it is…
Dielectric elastomers (DEs) that couple deformation and electrostatics have the potential for use in soft sensors and actuators with applications ranging from robotic, biomedical, energy, aerospace and automotive technologies. However,…
Contractility in animal cells is often generated by molecular motors such as myosin, which require polar substrates for their function. Motivated by recent experimental evidence of motor-independent contractility, we propose a robust…
Topology is an important determinant of the behavior of a great number of condensed-matter systems, but until recently has played a minor role in elasticity. We develop a theory for the deformations of a class of twisted non-Euclidean…
Cells moving on a two dimensional substrate generate motion by polymerizing actin filament networks inside a flat membrane protrusion. New filaments are generated by branching off existing ones, giving rise to branched network structures.…
We present a detailed study of a clamped ribbon-like filament under a compressive active force using Brownian dynamics simulations. We show that a clamped ribbon-like filament is able to capture beating as well as a rotational motion under…
Many neural network architectures rely on the choice of the activation function for each hidden layer. Given the activation function, the neural network is trained over the bias and the weight parameters. The bias catches the center of the…
The adaptive learning capabilities seen in biological neural networks are largely a product of the self-modifying behavior emerging from online plastic changes in synaptic connectivity. Current methods in Reinforcement Learning (RL) only…
We study the activated motion of adsorbed polymers which are driven over a structured substrate by a localized point force.Our theory applies to experiments with single polymers using, for example, tips of scanning force microscopes to drag…
A flexible membrane deforming its shape in time can self-propel in a viscous fluid. Alternatively, if the membrane is anchored, its deformation will lead to fluid transport. Past work in this area focused on situations where the deformation…
Recent studies in mammalian hearts show that left ventricular wall thickening is an important mechanism for systolic ejection and that during contraction the cardiac muscle develops significant stresses in the muscular cross-fiber…
The collective action of actively contractile units embedded in elastic biopolymer networks plays a crucial role in regulating the network's macroscopic mechanical response. Here, we investigate how the macroscopic boundary stress in model…
The expressive power of artificial neural networks crucially depends on the nonlinearity of their activation functions. Though a wide variety of nonlinear activation functions have been proposed for use in artificial neural networks, a…