We employ the principle of dynamic equivalence between soft-sphere and hard-sphere fluids [Phys. Rev. E 68, 011405 (2003)] to describe the interplay of the effects of varying the density n, the temperature T, and the softness (characterized by a softness parameter ν(-1)) on the dynamics of glass-forming soft-sphere liquids in terms of simple scaling rules. The main prediction is the existence o...

Growing evidence suggests that physical microenvironments and mechanical stresses, in addition to soluble factors, help direct mesenchymal-stem-cell fate. However, biological responses to a local force in embryonic stem cells remain elusive. Here we show that a local cyclic stress through focal adhesions induced spreading in mouse embryonic stem cells but not in mouse embryonic stem-cell-differ...

The reaction force and the electronic flux, first proposed by Toro-Labbé et al. (J Phys Chem A 103:4398, 1999) have been expressed by the existing conceptual DFT apparatus. The critical points (extremes) of the chemical potential, global hardness and softness have been identified by means of the existing and computable energy derivatives: the Hellman-Feynman force, nuclear reactivity and nuclea...

Typical robot platforms comprise rigid links with fixed degrees-offreedom, solid blocks of transmission and actuator, and superficial positioning of sensors: they are often optimized for the given design criteria but are unable to execute instantaneous changes to the robot's initial mechanism design. The reallife incidences, however, require robots to face complex situations filled with unprogr...

The soft fundamental-measure theory, which was based on the additive colloid-polymer mixture [M. Schmidt, Phys. Rev. E 62, 3799 (2000)] has been employed to investigate the adsorption of a colloid-polymer mixture within a hard slit pore. The calculated results show that the adsorption for the confined colloid-polymer mixture is very different from those of the colloid-colloid and polymer-polyme...

Schematic diagram of the structure supercrystals built by softly coated gold nanoparticules.

Active matter studies are increasingly geared towards the high-density or glassy limit. This is mainly inspired by remarkable resemblance between active materials and conventional passive matter. Interestingly, within this limit it has recently been shown that relaxation dynamics of quasi-hard spheres non-monotonic most enhanced activity when intrinsic length scale (e.g., persistence length) eq...