BONE HEALING. "The piezoelectric effect plays an important role in bone growth, remodeling, and fracture healing." https://lnkd.in/eBe5QYb View in LinkedIn
NERVE AND MUSCLE ION CHANNELS are "excitable membranes and ion channels exhibit properties characteristic of ferroelectrics, including critical temperatures, hysteresis, pyroelectricity and surface charges...Leuchtag proposed a functional role for ferroelectric phase transitions in ion channels." https://lnkd.in/eBe5QYb View in LinkedIn
PIEZOACTIVITY, polarization and optical birefringence, such as in butterfly wings, are explored in chemicals for nanomotors and molecular machines. Biomimicry at its best. An inspiring review. https://lnkd.in/eBe5QYb View in LinkedIn
MIT SELF-ASSEMBLY LAB. “Natural phenomena such as growth, evolution and self-organisation are no longer only studied in design as mere metaphors or digital simulations. Rather, they can now be utilised in physical materials and fabricated systems.” https://lnkd.in/dKGCmuj View in LinkedIn
ENERGY COUPLING IS KEY. "Functionality of biological and inorganic systems ranging from non-volatile computer memories and microelectromechanical systems to electromotor proteins and cellular membranes is ultimately based on the intricate coupling between electrical and mechanical phenomena." https://lnkd.in/ehnBzph View in LinkedIn
“PROGRAMMABLE PROPERTIES of innate or living things include SGH, ferroelectricity, pyroelectricity, piezoelectricity, and optical activity, and coupling of different streams of energy. And as we have explored before in earlier blogs, also phase changes in intracellular structured water.” https://lnkd.in/d2H77Zq View in LinkedIn
FRAGMENT FROM NATURE focuses on the evolution of plant body plans for this and next weekend. Plants can sometimes seem like extraterrestrial creatures. Wrapping ones mind around them is not easy, and biologists have long demonstrated a lack of understanding of these curious beings, which are so much less like vertebrates. How can an advanced creature be both diffuse (plant intelligence) and modular (cut off a bit of a plant and propagate it)? View in LinkedIn
FOCUS ON ANIMAL BODY PLANS. "Much has been written about the initial appearance and subsequent evolution of metazoan body plans, particularly in terms of the great Cambrian `explosion' and the attending evolutionary debut of multicellular animal body plans during a comparatively brief period of time." https://lnkd.in/dqAQfMR View in LinkedIn
PLANT BODY PLANS. "In contrast, the evolution of body plans among plants, here defined as photosynthetic eukaryotes, has received comparatively much less attention and has been discussed largely in the context of the radiation of the early vascular land plants and their terrestrial non-vascular predecessors during early Paleozoic times." http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/85/4/411.full.pdf View in LinkedIn