Soft materials articles within Nature Physics

Featured

  • News & Views |

    The transport properties of many two-dimensional systems are strongly affected by the proximity of a periodic pattern. Colloidal particles are now shown to have preferred sliding routes due to competing symmetries between two unmatched crystalline surfaces.

    • Pietro Tierno

  • Letter |

    Structures containing multiple skyrmions inside a larger skyrmion—called skyrmion bags—are experimentally created in liquid crystals and theoretically predicted in magnetic materials. These may have applications in information storage technology.

    • David Foster
    • , Charles Kind
    •  & Ivan I. Smalyukh

  • News & Views |

    Ultrasonic radiation forces are harnessed to trap and then shake clusters of spheres — mimicking the effect of temperature on cluster formation in granular systems. This assembly process has applications from the nanoscale to the macroscale.

    • Bruce Drinkwater

  • Letter |

    Collagen networks go from soft to rigid when strained, but in tissue they exist in a soft matrix. An enhanced stiffness and delayed strain-stiffening is now revealed in the composite, which may explain the remarkable sensitivity of living tissue.

    • Federica Burla
    • , Justin Tauber
    •  & Gijsje H. Koenderink

  • News & Views |

    An inspired experimental approach sheds light on the formation of active turbulence in a system of microtubules and molecular motors. The emergent scaling behaviour takes us a step closer to understanding how activity begets turbulence.

    • Seth Fraden

  • Letter |

    Experiments on microtubule-based nematics, together with active gel theory, suggest that the length scale associated with active turbulence is selected at its onset—balancing activity with the stabilizing effects of nematic elasticity and geometry.

    • Berta Martínez-Prat
    • , Jordi Ignés-Mullol
    •  & Francesc Sagués

  • News & Views |

    A large-scale imaging study has tracked thousands of bacteria living in three-dimensional biofilms. This technical tour de force reveals the importance of mechanical interactions between cells for building local and global structure.

    • Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo

  • Letter |

    Single-cell tracking of up to 10,000 bacteria reveals the structure and dynamics of 3D biofilms—providing evidence to suggest that both local ordering and global biofilm architecture emerge from mechanical interactions.

    • Raimo Hartmann
    • , Praveen K. Singh
    •  & Knut Drescher

  • News & Views |

    An active counterpart to passive wetting is an encouraging sign for tissue physics and, more generally, the interface between biology and physics.

    • Richard G. Morris
    •  & Alpha S. Yap

  • Letter |

    Suspended clusters of honeybees withstand dynamic mechanical forcing from their environment. Experiments and simulations suggest that collective stability relies on individual bees responding to local variations in strain.

    • O. Peleg
    • , J. M. Peters
    •  & L. Mahadevan

  • Article |

    A rigid particle moving along a soft wall feels a repulsive force that can reduce its drag. Evidence now suggests that for thin enough walls the particle can be displaced appreciably—a finding that may have implications for biological membranes.

    • Bhargav Rallabandi
    • , Naomi Oppenheimer
    •  & Howard A. Stone

  • Letter |

    Water drops placed at rest on flat, hot solids are found to rotate and spontaneously propel themselves in the direction of their rotation. The effect is due to symmetry breaking of the flow inside the drop, which couples rotation to translation.

    • Ambre Bouillant
    • , Timothée Mouterde
    •  & David Quéré

  • News & Views |

    Building spinning microrotors that self-assemble and synchronize to form a gear sounds like an impossible feat. However, it has now been achieved using only a single type of building block — a colloid that self-propels.

    • Peer Fischer

  • Letter |

    Active colloidal particles are shown to be capable of aggregating into stable spinning clusters that constitute self-powered microgears. The demonstration reveals a new design principle for micromachinery using dissipative building blocks.

    • Antoine Aubret
    • , Mena Youssef
    •  & Jérémie Palacci

  • News & Views |

    Understanding how natural surfaces repel foulants by wrinkling seems like a simple matter of elasticity. But the nonlinear behaviours that emerge from dimensional effects make for some intriguing new physics.

    • Haim Diamant

  • Article |

    Natural surfaces better their synthetic counterparts at coping with biofouling. A characterization of topography-induced delamination reveals a mechanism whereby elastic energy drives the crack propagation that facilitates surface renewal.

    • Luka Pocivavsek
    • , Joseph Pugar
    •  & Enrique Cerda

  • News & Views |

    The ideas of topology are breaking ground in origami-based metamaterials. Experiments now show that certain shapes — doughnuts included — exhibit topological bistability, and can be made to click between different topologically stable states.

    • Scott R. Waitukaitis

  • Letter |

    Origami-inspired metamaterial design gives rise to structures with kinematic properties dictated by the topology of their configuration space. The approach allows for well-defined metamaterial properties even in the presence of unpredictable forces.

    • Bin Liu
    • , Jesse L. Silverberg
    •  & Itai Cohen

  • News & Views |

    Bedforms in deserts include both small ripples and sand dunes that can reach tens to hundreds of metres in length — with seemingly little in between. It now looks as though intermediate-sized megaripples do appear if the conditions are just right.

    • N. M. Vriend
    •  & P. A. Jarvis

  • News & Views |

    Streams of motile cells appear in both healthy development and the evolution of tumours. A study of cells under lateral confinement now suggests their activity plays a key role in triggering these flows.

    • Francesc Sagués

  • Letter |

    Antiparallel streams of nematically oriented cells arise in both embryonic development and cancer. In vitro experiments and a hydrodynamic active gel theory suggest that these cells are subject to a transition that is driven by their activity.

    • G. Duclos
    • , C. Blanch-Mercader
    •  & P. Silberzan

  • Article |

    Epithelial cells are shown to scale via a shape distribution that is common to a number of different systems, suggesting that cell shape and shape variability are constrained through a relationship that is purely geometrical.

    • Lior Atia
    • , Dapeng Bi
    •  & Jeffrey J. Fredberg

  • Article |

    Wrinkling in human brain organoids suggests that brain development may be mechanically driven, a notion supported only by model gels so far. Evidence in this simple living system highlights roles for cytoskeletal contraction and nuclear expansion.

    • Eyal Karzbrun
    • , Aditya Kshirsagar
    •  & Orly Reiner

  • News & Views |

    Understanding how some single cells evolved into multicellular life means figuring out how they overcome the stresses associated with crowding as they multiply. New insights from yeast suggest that changes in the shape of cells may provide an answer.

    • Vernita D. Gordon

  • Letter |

    Understanding how single cells evolved into multicellular organisms requires knowledge of the physical constraints on the evolution of cell clusters. Evidence that an evolution in cell shape delays fracturing offers a route to increased complexity.

    • Shane Jacobeen
    • , Jennifer T. Pentz
    •  & Peter J. Yunker

  • Article |

    A liquid droplet is shown to slide across a solid surface subject to friction forces analogous with those between two solids. The phenomenon is generic, and closes a gap in our understanding of liquid–solid friction.

    • Nan Gao
    • , Florian Geyer
    •  & Rüdiger Berger

  • Article |

    Topological defects in a turbulent active nematic on a toroidal surface are shown to segregate in regions of opposite curvature. Simulations suggest that this behaviour may be controlled — or even suppressed — by tuning the level of activity.

    • Perry W. Ellis
    • , Daniel J. G. Pearce
    •  & Alberto Fernandez-Nieves

  • News & Views |

    That the unit cell of a metamaterial can't be considered vanishingly small like in ordinary crystals has long been deemed more burden than opportunity. The emergence of a characteristic length scale in metamaterial chains may change that trend.

    • Muamer Kadic
    • , Tobias Frenzel
    •  & Martin Wegener

  • Letter |

    The photoactive properties of microalgae are well documented when it comes to photosynthesis and motility. But it seems their adhesion to surfaces can also be manipulated with light, which may serve to optimize their photoactive functionality.

    • Christian Titus Kreis
    • , Marine Le Blay
    •  & Oliver Bäumchen

  • News & Views |

    Vast beds of 'hair' coat many living systems, and usually exhibit shear-thinning behaviour — their flow resistance lessens with speed. But with geometric tweaks, such beds can also show shear-thickening and asymmetric ratchet-like behaviour.

    • Mitul Luhar

  • Letter |

    Deformable polygons are shown to form fibres when the energies associated with attraction and deformation are comparable. The fibres constitute a kinetically trapped metastable state, reminiscent of irreversible protein assembly in living systems.

    • Martin Lenz
    •  & Thomas A. Witten

  • Article |

    Lubricated surfaces are known to display extreme liquid repellency. Such behaviour is now confirmed to be due to the formation of a film between the surface and the repelled liquid, with a thickness profile following the Landau–Levich–Derjaguin law.

    • Dan Daniel
    • , Jaakko V. I. Timonen
    •  & Joanna Aizenberg

Browse broader subjects

Browse narrower subjects

Browse Soft materials across other nature.com journals