Related papers: Geomimicry: Emergent Dynamics in Earth-Mediated Co…
This paper presents a conceptual model describing the medium and long-term co-evolution of natural and socio-economic subsystems of Earth. An economy is viewed as an out-of-equilibrium dissipative structure that can only be maintained with…
Combinatorial mechanical metamaterials feature spatially textured soft modes that yield exotic and useful mechanical properties. While a single soft mode often can be rationally designed by following a set of tiling rules for the building…
Cellular solids and micro-lattices are a class of lightweight architected materials that have been established for their unique mechanical, thermal, and acoustic properties. It has been shown that by tuning material architecture, a…
Metamaterials are artificial composite structures designed for controlling waves or fields, and exhibit interaction phenomena that are unexpected on the basis of their chemical constituents. These phenomena are encoded in effective material…
Architectural transformations play a key role in the evolution of complex systems, from design algorithms for metamaterials to flow and plasticity of disordered media. Here, we develop a general framework for the evolution of the linear…
Rigidity is an emergent property of materials - it is not a feature of individual components that comprise the structure, but instead arises from interactions between many constituent parts. Recently, it has been recognized that…
Thin surfaces are ubiquitous in nature, from leaves to cell membranes, and in technology, from paper to corrugated containers. Structural thinness imbues them with flexibility, the ability to easily bend under light loads, even as their…
Defects, and in particular topological defects, are architectural motifs that play a crucial role in natural materials. Here we provide a systematic strategy to introduce such defects in mechanical metamaterials. We first present…
Humanoid motion control has witnessed significant breakthroughs in recent years, with deep reinforcement learning (RL) emerging as a primary catalyst for achieving complex, human-like behaviors. However, the high dimensionality and…
A new modelling approach shows how the Earth's hidden vibrations may drive global weather dynamics and atmospheric pressure variations, hinting that the planet's own beat could be imprinted on our climate. The atmospheric rotational…
Living soft tissues appear to promote the development and maintenance of a preferred mechanical state within a defined tolerance around a so-called set-point. This phenomenon is often referred to as mechanical homeostasis. In contradiction…
In the automated co-design of soft robots, precisely adapting the material stiffness field to task environments is crucial for unlocking their full physical potential. However, mainstream platforms (e.g., EvoGym) strictly discretize the…
The macroscopic behaviour of active matter arises from nonequilibrium microscopic processes. In soft materials, active stresses typically drive macroscopic shape changes, which in turn alter the geometry constraining the microscopic…
Nature has engineered complex designs to achieve advanced properties and functionalities through evolution, over millions of years. Many organisms have adapted to their living environment producing extremely efficient materials and…
Earth's water, intrinsic oxidation state, and metal core density are fundamental chemical features of our planet. Studies of exoplanets provide a useful context for elucidating the source of these chemical traits. Planet formation and…
The scope of the paper is to present some aspects of the development of a "macro-element" for dynamic soil-structure interaction analyses of shallow foundations. Initially the concept of "macro-element" is introduced and is illustrated with…
Advances in scaling down heterostructures and having an improved interface quality together with atomically-thin two-dimensional materials suggest a novel approach to systematically design materials. A given material can be transformed…
We present the Transparent Earth, a transformer-based architecture for reconstructing subsurface properties from heterogeneous datasets that vary in sparsity, resolution, and modality, where each modality represents a distinct type of…
Farmed landscapes provide a natural laboratory to test how management reshapes near-surface hydrodynamics. Combining distributed acoustic sensing with physics-based hydromechanical modeling, we tracked minute-resolution, meter-scale changes…
Living cells are soft bodies of a characteristic form, but endowed with a capacity for a steady turnover of their structures. Both of these material properties, i.e. recovery of the shape after an external stress has been imposed and…