Related papers: The 2024 Motile Active Matter Roadmap
Active matter composed of energy-generating microscopic constituents is a promising platform to create autonomous functional materials. However, the very presence of these microscopic energy sources is what makes active matter prone to…
Smart matter consists of many sensors, computers and actuators embedded within materials. These microelectromechanical systems allow properties of the materials to be adjusted under program control. In this context, we study the behavior of…
Living systems continuously transform matter and energy through the chemical processes that constitute their metabolism. The overall metabolic rate of an organism correlates positively with its body mass, however both the exact scaling…
Computation, mechanics and materials merge in biological systems, which can continually self-optimize through internal adaptivity across length scales, from cytoplasm and biofilms to animal herds. Recent interest in such material-based…
Active systems are driven out of equilibrium by exchanging energy and momentum with their environment. This endows them with anomalous mechanical properties that we review in this colloquium for the case of dry scalar active matter, which…
The study of active matter has revealed novel non-equilibrium collective behaviors, illustrating their potential as a new materials platform. However, most works treat active matter as unregulated systems with uniform microscopic energy…
Coordinated movement and self-organisation of active self-driven agents is common in nature and is seen across different scales, from herds of animals to collective motion in bacteria. Often, these systems are heterogeneous in composition,…
Multi-modality is an important feature of sensor based activity recognition. In this work, we consider two inherent characteristics of human activities, the spatially-temporally varying salience of features and the relations between…
Chemically or optically powered active matter plays an increasingly important role in materials design but its computational potential has yet to be explored systematically. The competition between energy consumption and dissipation imposes…
This paper presents the principal challenges and opportunities associated with computational biomechanics research. The underlying cognitive control involved in the process of human motion is inherently complex, dynamic, multidimensional,…
Natural systems integrate the work of many sub-units (cells) toward a large-scale unified goal (morphological and behavioral), which can counteract the effects of unexpected experiences, damage, or simply changes in tasks demands. In this…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
Molecular machines transduce free energy between different forms throughout all living organisms. While truly machines in their own right, unlike their macroscopic counterparts molecular machines are characterized by stochastic…
Large ensembles of interacting, out-of-equilibrium agents are a paradigm of active matter. Their constituents' intrinsic activity may entail the spontaneous separation into localized phases of high and low densities. Motile microbes,…
The non-invasive spatiotemporal control of cellular functions, organization of tissues, and even the behavior of small animals has become paramount for advanced therapies. As magnetic fields do not interact with biological matter, their…
Life mechanics, an emerging field, focuses on the self-organizing forces and motions within living systems. This study introduces the novel concept of active force, generated by mind-body interactions, as an essential element in…
Many fascinating properties of biological active matter crucially depend on the capacity of constituting entities to perform directed motion, e.g., molecular motors transporting vesicles inside cells or bacteria searching for food. While…
Scaling laws illuminate Nature's fundamental biological principles and guide bioinspired materials and structural designs. In simple cases they are based on the fundamental principle that all laws of nature remain unchanged (i.e.,…
The past decade has seen unprecedented growth in active matter and autonomous biomaterials research, yielding diverse classes of materials that promise revolutionary applications such as self-healing infrastructure and self-sensing tissue…
Active matter systems characterized by the interplay of chirality and self-alignment offer a rich landscape for the emergence of non-equilibrium collective behaviors and the development of autonomous materials. We present a versatile…