jamming – Quanta Magazine

‘Traffic Jams’ of Cells Help to Sculpt Embryos

Jordana Cepelewicz — Thu, 27 Sep 2018 13:39:05 +0000

What do incipient organs, traffic jams and the frothy head of foam at the top of a beer glass have in common? Far more than expected, according to results published in Nature earlier this month. For the first time, using a series of clever, state-of-the-art techniques, scientists have uncovered the balance of physical forces that shapes tissues in developing embryos. And the process they’ve...

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The Physics of Glass Opens a Window Into Biology

Jordana Cepelewicz — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 14:55:08 +0000

The ebb and flow of vehicles along congested highways was what first drew Lisa Manning to her preferred corner of physics, during the summer before she began her graduate studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was mesmerized by the emergent behaviors in the traffic flow — “how you could start out with local rules between cars and get waves of jams through traffic,” she said.

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Jammed Cells Expose the Physics of Cancer

Gabriel Popkin — Tue, 16 Aug 2016 14:29:58 +0000

In 1995, while he was a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal, the biomedical scientist Peter Friedl saw something so startling it kept him awake for several nights. Coordinated groups of cancer cells he was growing in his adviser’s lab started moving through a network of fibers meant to mimic the spaces between cells in the human body. For more than a century...

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