A mechanochemical model recapitulates distinct vertebrate gastrulation modes.

During vertebrate gastrulation, an embryo transforms from a layer of epithelial cells into a multilayered gastrula. This process requires the coordinated movements of hundreds to tens of thousands of cells, depending on the organism. In the chick embryo, patterns of actomyosin cables spanning several cells drive coordinated tissue flows.

Fluctuation-induced force in homogeneous isotropic turbulence.

Understanding force generation in nonequilibrium systems is a notable challenge in statistical physics. We uncover a fluctuation-induced force between two plates immersed in homogeneous isotropic turbulence using direct numerical simulations. The force is a nonmonotonic function of plate separation.

Growth dynamics of microbubbles on microcavity arrays by solvent exchange: Experiments and numerical simulations.

Solvent exchange is a flow process to induce a transient oversaturation for forming nanobubbles or nanodroplets on solid surfaces by displacing the solution of gases or droplet liquids with a controlled flow of a poor solvent. In this work, we experimentally and numerically investigate the effect of the flow rate and other control parameters on the formation of microbubbles on hydrophobic cavity arrays during the solvent exchange process. We find that the growth rate, location, and number density of microbubbles are closely related to flow rate, solvent concentration, cavity distance, and spatial arrangement.

Flow-induced dissolution of femtoliter surface droplet arrays.

The dissolution of liquid nanodroplets is a crucial step in many applied processes, such as separation and dispersion in the food industry, crystal formation of pharmaceutical products, concentrating and analysis in medical diagnosis, and drug delivery in aerosols. In this work, using both experiments and numerical simulations, we quantitatively study the dissolution dynamics of femtoliter surface droplets in a highly ordered array under a uniform flow. Our results show that the dissolution of femtoliter droplets strongly depends on their spatial positions relative to the flow direction, drop-to-drop spacing in the array, and the imposed flow rate.