Biological tissues as mechanical metamaterials In multicellular organisms, properly programmed collective motion is required to form tissues and organs, and this programming breaks down in diseases like cancer. Recent experimental work highlights that some organisms tune the global mechanical properties of a tissue across a fluid-solid transition to allow or […]
Placement and Symmetry of Singularities on Curved Surfaces In various contexts, biological structures resemble regular two-dimensional lattices made from smaller units like macromolecules (on the nanoscale) or cells (on the tissue scale). This regularity carries an inherent elastic energy penalty when the 2D manifold is also required to have intrinsic […]
Packing, geometry & entropy: Crystallization of spheres in a sphere When twelve equally sized spheres are packed around a central sphere, the smallest volume of the resulting cluster and thus the highest packing is obtained for a regular icosahedron, a shape with twenty equilateral triangles as faces and a five-fold […]
Twisted topological tangles or: the knot theory of knitting Abstract: Imagine a 1D curve, then use it to fill a 2D manifold that covers an arbitrary 3D object – this computationally intensive materials challenge has been realized in the ancient technology known as knitting. This process for making functional materials 2D materials […]
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