Topic
Elasticity and mechanical metamaterials research, explained
8 open-access elasticity and mechanical metamaterials studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- Does DMSO soften or stiffen cell membranes?
DMSO's effect on membranes depends on their composition and phase: it strongly alters cholesterol-free bilayers, barely touches cholesterol-rich ones, and makes red cells leak ATP even at low doses.
- How does pulling force change how chaperones help proteins refold?
How hard a stretched protein is pulled decides how strongly the helper protein DnaJ grabs it, and the full chaperone team turns from blocking folding to speeding it up.
- Can one carbon material be both ultra-hard and conductive?
Squeezing and heating glassy carbon in a narrow temperature window produced a carbon composite of tiny diamonds in conductive graphene that is nearly as hard as diamond yet still conducts electricity.
- Can aging under load train a material's elasticity?
Simply holding a disordered foam network squeezed for long enough makes it auxetic, meaning it shrinks sideways when compressed, because its most stressed links weaken the most.
- How stiff are lipid domains, and what forces align them?
Ordered, cholesterol-rich membrane domains are about three times stiffer than disordered ones, and thermal wobbling of the floppier domains provides a large share of the repulsion between membranes.
- How can a heat-driven rubbery ribbon steer itself out of a maze?
A heat-powered rolling ribbon with one twisted end and one helical end kept turning on its own and escaped mazes, while ribbons that were symmetric stopped turning and got trapped.
- Are flat clathrin coats spring-loaded to curve?
Flat clathrin lattices on cell membranes store elastic bending energy, and cutting their connections with an AFM tip makes them spontaneously curl into more curved pits.
- Does bending a membrane sort its cholesterol?
Stretching cell-sized lipid bubbles with laser tweezers loosened lipid packing at the highly curved ends and moved cholesterol toward the flatter middle, measured without any fluorescent labels.