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The incessant activity of swimming microorganisms has a direct physical effect on surrounding microscopic objects, leading to enhanced diffusion far beyond the level of Brownian motion with possible influences on the spatial distribution of…
Fingernail imaging has been proven to be effective in prior works [1],[2] for estimating the 3D fingertip forces with a maximum RMS estimation error of 7%. In the current research, fingernail imaging is used to perform unconstrained grasp…
To develop active materials that can efficiently respond to external stimuli with designed mechanical motions is one of the major obstacles that have hindered the realization of nanomachines and nanorobots. Here, we propose an innovative…
Directly examining subcellular mechanics whilst avoiding excessive strain of a live cell requires the precise control of light stress on very small areas, which is fundamentally difficult. Here we use a glass nanopipet out of contact with…
Radiation pressure, electrostriction, and photothermal forces have been investigated to evidence backaction, non-linearities and quantum phenomena in cavity optomechanics. We show here through a detailed study of the relative intensity of…
Understanding mechanosensitivity, i.e. how cells sense the stiffness of their environment is very important, yet there is a fundamental difficulty in understanding its mechanism: to measure an elastic modulus one requires two points of…
In vitro neuronal culture is an important research platform in cellular and network neuroscience. However, neurons cultured on a homogeneous scaffold form dense, randomly connected networks and display excessively synchronized activity;…
Bacteria meticulously regulate their intracellular ion concentrations and create ionic concentration gradients across the bacterial membrane. These ionic concentration gradients provide free energy for many cellular processes and are…
Microfluidics offer remarkable flexibility for in-flow analyte characterization and can even measure the mechanical properties of biological cells through the application of hydrodynamic forces. In this work, we present a new approach to…
The small (1 mm) nematode $\textit{Caenorhabditis elegans}$ (Corsi [1], wormbook.org) has become widely used as a model organism; in particular, the $\textit{C. elegans}$ connectome has been completely mapped, and $\textit{C. elegans}$…
Just like electrical engineers understand how microprocessors execute programs in terms of how transistor currents are affected by their inputs, neuroscientists want to understand behavior production in terms of how neuronal outputs are…
Recently, nanomaterials are arousing increasing interest and a wide variety of opto-electronic devices have been developed, such as light-emitting diodes, solar cells, and photodetectors. However, the study of the light emission properties…
The transfer of angular momentum carried by photons into a microobject has been widely exploited to achieve the actuation of the microobject. However, this scheme is fundamentally defective in nonliquid environments as a result of the scale…
In the present paper we address the problem of the energy downconversion of the light absorbed by a protein into its internal vibrational modes. We consider the case in which the light receptors are fluorophores either naturally…
We provide a detailed study of the interplay between the different interactions which appear in the Brownian motion of a micronsized sphere immersed in a viscoelastic fluid measured with optical trapping interferometry. To explore a wide…
We use the principles of cavity optomechanics to design a resonant mechanical force sensor for atomic force microscopy. The sensor is based on a type of electromechanical coupling, dual to traditional capacitive coupling, whereby the motion…
Recent experiments revealing possible nanoscale electrostatic interactions in force generation at kinetochores for chromosome motions have prompted speculation regarding possible models for interactions between positively charged molecules…
Sensors are the first element of the pathways that control the response of cells to their environment. After chemical, the next most important cue is mechanical, and protein complexes that produce or enable a chemical signal in response to…
This paper introduces for the first time the concepts of non-coherent interfaces and microstructure-driven interface forces in the framework of micromorphic elasticity. It is shown that such concepts are of paramount importance when…
Microscale hydrogels comprised of macromolecular networks have increasingly been used for applications involving cell encapsulation, tissue engineering and for the storage and release of active cargo molecules. However, the majority of such…