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Legged machines are becoming increasingly agile and adaptive but they have so far lacked the morphological diversity of legged animals, which have been rearranged and reshaped to fill millions of niches. Unlike their biological…
Multi-legged robots with six or more legs are not in common use, despite designs with superior stability, maneuverability, and a low number of actuators being available for over 20 years. This may be in part due to the difficulty in…
The necks of the sauropod dinosaurs reached 15 m in length: six times longer than that of the world record giraffe and five times longer than those of all other terrestrial animals. Several anatomical features enabled this extreme…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in a wide range of natural language applications. However, they often struggle to recognize low-resource languages, in particular African languages, which are not well…
Living organisms intertwine soft (e.g., muscle) and hard (e.g., bones) materials, giving them an intrinsic flexibility and resiliency often lacking in conventional rigid robots. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these…
Soft robots have the ability to adapt to their environment, which makes them suitable for use in disaster areas and agricultural fields, where their mobility is constrained by complex terrain. One of the main challenges in developing soft…
Responding mechanically to environmental requests, muscles show a surprisingly large variety of functions. The studies of in vivo cycling muscles qualified skeletal muscles into four principal locomotor patterns: motor, brake, strut, and…
The tendon-driven musculoskeletal humanoid has many benefits that human beings have, but the modeling of its complex muscle and bone structures is difficult and conventional model-based controls cannot realize intended movements. Therefore,…
The lumbosacral organ (LSO) is a lumbosacral spinal canal morphology that is universally and uniquely found in birds. Recent studies suggested an intraspinal mechanosensor function that relies on the compliant motion of soft tissue in the…
Legged robots have great potential to perform loco-manipulation tasks, yet it is challenging to keep the robot balanced while it interacts with the environment. In this paper we study the use of additional contact points for maximising the…
Collagen fibrils, cable-like assemblies of long biological molecules, are dominant components of connective tissues. Their determinant morphological and functional roles motivated a large number of studies concerning their formation and…
Mechanical properties of the tissue engineering scaffolds are known to play a crucial role in tissue regeneration. Here, we have utilized discrete network and finite element models to study fibrous scaffold mechanics and its dependence on…
A central puzzle in strongly correlated electronic phases is strange metallic transport, marked by $T$-linear resistivity and $B$-linear magnetoresistance, in sharp contrast with quadratic scalings observed in conventional metals. Here, we…
Genetic interactions can strongly influence the fitness effects of individual mutations, yet the impact of these epistatic interactions on evolutionary dynamics remains poorly understood. Here we investigate the evolutionary role of…
Animals use past experiences to adapt future behavior. To enable this rapid learning, vertebrates and invertebrates have evolved analogous neural structures like the vertebrate cerebellum or insect mushroom body. A defining feature of these…
Understanding the growth and form of shapes is one of the most fundamental problems in biology. While many prior works have analyzed the beak shapes of Darwin's finches, other cranial features are relatively less explored. In this work, we…
Brain morphology is shaped by genetic and mechanical factors and is linked to biological development and diseases. Its fractal-like features, regional anisotropy, and complex curvature distributions hinder quantitative insights in medical…
The main objective of this work is to numerically investigate the effect of geometric imperfections on the macroscopic response and domain formation in soft biological composites that exhibit plasticity in the stiff (fiber) phase.This work…
Robotic spacecraft have helped expand our reach for many planetary exploration missions. Most ground mobile planetary exploration robots use wheeled or modified wheeled platforms. Although extraordinarily successful at completing intended…
Enzymes are on the front lines of evolution. All living organisms rely on highly efficient, specific enzymes for growth, sustenance, and reproduction; and many diseases are a consequence of a mutation on an enzyme that affects its catalytic…