Stacked Rayleigh-Taylor Instabilities Grow Drops into Soft Stalactitelike Structures.

The interplay between thin film hydrodynamics and solidification produces formidably intricate geophysical structures, such as stalactites and icicles, whose shape is a testimony of their long growth. In simpler settings, liquid films can also produce regular patterns. When coated on the underside of a flat plate, these films are unstable and yield lattices of drops following the Rayleigh-Taylor instability.

Emergent behaviors of buckling-driven elasto-active structures.

Active systems of self-propelled agents, e.g., birds, fish, and bacteria, can organize their collective motion into myriad autonomous behaviors.

Soft Deployable Structures via Core-Shell Inflatables.

Deployable structures capable of significant geometric reconfigurations are ubiquitous in nature. While engineering contraptions typically comprise articulated rigid elements, soft structures that experience material growth for deployment mostly remain the handiwork of biology, e.g.

Bubble casting soft robotics.

Inspired by living organisms, soft robots are developed from intrinsically compliant materials, enabling continuous motions that mimic animal and vegetal movement. In soft robots, the canonical hinges and bolts are replaced by elastomers assembled into actuators programmed to change shape following the application of stimuli, for example pneumatic inflation. The morphing information is typically directly embedded within the shape of these actuators, whose assembly is facilitated by recent advances in rapid prototyping techniques.

Chinese Propolis Prevents Obesity and Metabolism Syndromes Induced by a High Fat Diet and Accompanied by an Altered Gut Microbiota Structure in Mice.

The increasing incidence of obesity poses a great threat to public health worldwide. Recent reports also indicate the relevance of obesity in metabolic diseases. Chinese propolis (CP), as a well-studied natural nutraceutical, has shown a beneficial effect on alleviating diabetes mellitus.

Differences in the recruitment of DNA repair proteins at subtelomeric and interstitial I-SceI endonuclease-induced DNA double-strand breaks.

Telomeres are nucleoprotein structures that are required to protect chromosome ends. Dysfunctional telomeres are recognized as DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs), and elicit the activation of a DNA damage response (DDR). We have previously reported that DSBs near telomeres are poorly repaired, resulting in a high frequency of large deletions and gross chromosome rearrangements (GCRs).