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Cells are fundamental building blocks of living organisms displaying an array of shapes, morphologies, and textures that encode specific functions and physical behaviors. Elucidating the rules of this code remains a challenge. In this work,…
Research on untethered micro-swimming robots is growing fast owing to their potential impact on minimally invasive medical procedures. Candidate propulsion mechanisms of robots are based on flagellar mechanisms of microorganisms such as…
Weakly bound, physisorbed hydrocarbons could in principle provide a similar water-repellency as obtained by chemisorption of strongly bound hydrophobic molecules at surfaces. Here we present experiments and computer simulations on the…
We present a recently developed one-dimensional dipole lattice model that accurately captures the key properties of water in narrow nanopores. For this model, we derive three equivalent representations of the Hamiltonian that together yield…
Biologically-inspired robots are a very interesting and difficult branch of robotics dues to its very rich dynamical and morphological complexities. Among them, flying animals, such as bats, have been among the most difficult to take…
Traditional robotic mechanisms contain a series of rigid links connected by rotational joints that provide powered motion, all of which is controlled by a central processor. By contrast, analogous mechanisms found in nature, such as octopus…
The generation of fluid flows by autophoretic microswimmers has been proposed as a mechanism to enhance mass transport and mixing at the micro- and nanoscale. Here, we experimentally investigate the ability of model 2-D "active baths" of…
Glasses have numerous applications due to their exceptional transparency, however, poor fracture and impact resistance limit their applications as an engineering material. One relatively recent approach to improve the mechanical properties…
This paper proposes a biomimetic design framework based on biological strategy inversion, aiming to systematically map solutions evolved in nature to the engineering field. By constructing a "Function-Behavior-Feature-Environment" (F-B-Cs…
Traditional fish farming faces several challenges, including water pollution, temperature imbalance, feed, space, cost, etc. Biofloc technology in aquaculture transforms the manual into an advanced system that allows the reuse of unused…
The vast majority of the ocean's volume remains unexplored, in part because of limitations on the vertical range and measurement duration of existing robotic platforms. In light of the accelerating rate of climate change impacts on the…
Fully autonomous mobile robots have a multitude of potential applications, but guaranteeing robust navigation performance remains an open research problem. For many tasks such as repeated infrastructure inspection, item delivery, or…
Tactile sensing in biological organisms is deeply intertwined with morphological form, such as human fingers, cat paws, and elephant trunks, which enables rich and adaptive interactions through a variety of geometrically complex structures.…
Learning from nature has been a quest of humanity for millennia. While this has taken the form of humans assessing natural designs such as bones, butterfly wings, or spider webs, we can now achieve generating designs using advanced…
We engineered a microfluidic platform to study the effects of bioactive glass nanoparticles (BGNs) on cell viability under static culture. We incorporated different concentrations of BGNs (1%, 2%, and 3% w/v) in collagen hydrogel (with a…
To respond to the increasing need for bone repair strategies, various types of biomaterials have been developed. Among those, calcium phosphate ceramics (CPCs) are promising since they possess a chemical composition similar to that of…
Here we present a general overview of bio-inspired propulsion. We identify the major types of aquatic swimmers (oscillatory, undulatory, pulsatile, and drag-based) and break down their mechanisms for thrust production (drag-based,…
Bio-inspired vehicles are currently leading the way in the quest to produce a vehicle capable of flight and underwater navigation. However, a fully functional vehicle has not yet been realized. We present the first fully functional vehicle…
Recent advances in Nanotechnologies have prompted the need for tools to accurately and non-invasively manipulate individual nano-objects. Among possible strategies, optical forces have been foreseen to provide researchers with nano-optical…
Unlike human intestines, which are long, hollow tubes, the intestines of sharks and rays contain interior helical structures surrounding a cylindrical hole. One function of these structures may be to create asymmetric flow, favoring passage…