soft matter – Quanta Magazine

Starfish Whisperer Develops a Physical Language of Life

Charlie Wood — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 15:21:41 +0000

In a sunny lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, two starfish fought over their prey. Overlapping arms pinned a hunk of thawing cocktail shrimp against the side of the tank. Thousands of suction cups rippled furiously against the glass as each echinoderm struggled to inch the prize toward its own maw. The physicist Nikta Fakhri looked on with a grin. Not many physicists keep ocean life...

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Strange Metal-like Bonds Discovered in Customized Crystals

Erika K. Carlson — Tue, 03 Sep 2019 15:30:28 +0000

Chad Mirkin didn’t set out to discover a new property in matter. But when you’re inventing an alternative to atom-based chemistry, something strange is bound to happen. For years, he and his colleagues had been exploring something he called “programmable atom equivalents” — tiny nanoparticles, covered with strands of DNA, that mimic the bonding behavior of atoms. But unlike atoms...

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Bubble Experiment Finds Universal Laws

Charlie Wood — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 15:30:26 +0000

Each time a drop drips from a faucet, nature performs a magic trick. Breaking one blob into two calls for passage through a singularity — a single point where physical quantities flirt with the infinite. As the neck connecting the two blobs thins to nothing, the fluid pressure and speed race upward toward infinity, as if they were being divided by zero. Here, the equations used to describe fluids...

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‘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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