Les arbres perçoivent leur courbure et la rectifient activement grâce à un bois spécial dit « bois de tension », de manière analogue au contrôle postural des animaux.

Snake embryos coil, but how and why they corkscrew remains unexplored. Weber et al. find that the embryos wind up clockwise via buckling of the rapidly elongating axial body against the slow-growing, ...

Summary: A guide to mechanics in development: unlock how forces, material properties and geometry shape the forms of life.

A well-known fluid dynamical instability may hold the key to understanding shape changes and spatial organization in certain biological systems.

Adult intestinal size plasticity is driven not only by epithelial stem cells but also by remodeling of the surrounding visceral musculature. Sex- and reproduction-dependent muscle remodeling controls ...

Des physiciens se sont penchés sur le mécanisme qui permet à la dionée attrape-mouche de piéger les insectes qui s’aventureraient à l’intérieur de ses « mâchoires ».

Certaines plantes carnivores comme la dionée attrape-mouche se referment sur leurs proies en quelques dixièmes de secondes seulement. Comment parviennent-elles à être aussi rapides en l'absence de mus...

Previous theory of water transport is ruled out

En un dixième de seconde, la dionée referme son piège. C’est bien trop rapide pour l’hypothèse privilégiée jusqu’à présent. Une nouvelle étude lève le voile sur la mécanique des plantes carnivores.

This week, the cover of the international journal 'Science' features the carnivorous plant 'Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula)', which preys on insects.

Pity the poor fly that lands on a Venus flytrap. When the insect touches hair-like structures on this ​remarkable carnivorous plant, its trap snaps shut, dooming the victim to be digested over several days in secreted enzymes. Scientists have now found the physical mechanism ‌behind this snapping action.

Softening of the cells on the outermost suface of the trap lets the plant move at a breakneck pace.

Densely packed epithelial tissues appear mechanically arrested at tissue scale, but their cells move in subtle, coordinated ways.

Mechanical forces shape the developing heart by controlling cell volume through a Piezo1-driven hydraulic mechanism.

How stochastic cell fate and endoreduplication yield non-random epidermal patterns - Volume 7

A robotic metamaterial shows that the odd mechanics of active solids depend on how the active constituents connect across the system.

Mathematical network models are extremely useful to capture complex propagation processes between different regions (nodes), e.g. the spread of an infectious agent between different countries, or the transport and replication of toxic proteins across different brain regions in neurodegenerative diseases. In these models, transport is modelled at the macroscale through an operator, the so-called graph Laplacian, based on the edge properties and topology, capturing the fluxes between different nodes of the network. However, this phenomenological approach fails to take into account the physical processes taking place, at the microscale, within the edge. A fundamental problem is then to obtain a transport operator from mechanistic principles based on the underlying transport process. Using advection-reaction-diffusion as a generic mechanism for inter-nodal exchanges, we derive a multiscale network transport model and derive the corresponding linear transport operator at the macroscale from first principles. This effective graph Laplacian is fully determined by the transport mechanisms along the edges at the microscale. We show that this operator correctly captures the transport, and we study its scaling properties with respect to edge length.

The familiar phenomenon has puzzled researchers for centuries, but experiments are finally making sense of its unruly behaviours.

How does the corneal lens in the fly eye acquire its light-focusing shape? This study shows that centrally located cells produce large amounts of chitin to form the thick central corneal lens, while p...

Growing tissues can crack, break, and dissociate to form structures that can later withstand immense forces.

Summary: This Review presents mechanical fracture as a unifying morphogenetic strategy and describes how developmental systems actively exploit mechanical fracture to drive morphogenesis, reproduction...

Hydraulic resistance of channels obstructed by a dense array of elastic fibres - Volume 1028