There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

抗原变异可使得多种致病微生物易于逃避宿主免疫应答。表达在感染红细胞表面的恶性疟原虫红细胞表面蛋白1（PfPMP1）与感染红细胞、内皮细胞、树突状细胞以及胎盘的单个或多个受体作用，在黏附及免疫逃避中起关键的作用。每个单倍体基因组var基因家族编码约60种成员，通过启动转录不同的var基因变异体为抗原变异提供了分子基础。

疟原虫var基因转换速率变化导致抗原变异[英]／Paul H, Robert P, Christodoulou Z, et al//Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

Cell motility in viscous fluids is ubiquitous and affects many biological processes, including reproduction, infection and the marine life ecosystem. Here we review the biophysical and mechanical principles of locomotion at the small scales relevant to cell swimming, tens of micrometers and below. At this scale, inertia is unimportant and the Reynolds number is small. Our emphasis is on the simple physical picture and fundamental flow physics phenomena in this regime. We first give a brief overview of the mechanisms for swimming motility, and of the basic properties of flows at low Reynolds number, paying special attention to aspects most relevant for swimming such as resistance matrices for solid bodies, flow singularities and kinematic requirements for net translation. Then we review classical theoretical work on cell motility, in particular early calculations of swimming kinematics with prescribed stroke and the application of resistive force theory and slender-body theory to flagellar locomotion. After examining the physical means by which flagella are actuated, we outline areas of active research, including hydrodynamic interactions, biological locomotion in complex fluids, the design of small-scale artificial swimmers and the optimization of locomotion strategies. (Some figures in this article are in colour only in the electronic version) This article was invited by Christoph Schmidt.

/pdf/the-hydrodynamics-of-swimming-microorganisms-bonwl3c7w2.pdf

The hydrodynamics of swimming microorganisms

Superhydrophobic self-cleaning surfaces are based on the surface micro/nanomorphologies; however, such surfaces are mechanically weak and stop functioning when exposed to oil. We have created an ethanolic suspension of perfluorosilane-coated titanium dioxide nanoparticles that forms a paint that can be sprayed, dipped, or extruded onto both hard and soft materials to create a self-cleaning surface that functions even upon emersion in oil. Commercial adhesives were used to bond the paint to various substrates and promote robustness. These surfaces maintained their water repellency after finger-wipe, knife-scratch, and even 40 abrasion cycles with sandpaper. The formulations developed can be used on clothes, paper, glass, and steel for a myriad of self-cleaning applications.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/347/6226/1132.full.pdf

Robust self-cleaning surfaces that function when exposed to either air or oil

Locomotion and transport of microorganisms in fluids is an essential aspect of life. Search for food, orientation toward light, spreading of off-spring, and the formation of colonies are only possible due to locomotion. Swimming at the microscale occurs at low Reynolds numbers, where fluid friction and viscosity dominates over inertia. Here, evolution achieved propulsion mechanisms, which overcome and even exploit drag. Prominent propulsion mechanisms are rotating helical flagella, exploited by many bacteria, and snake-like or whip-like motion of eukaryotic flagella, utilized by sperm and algae. For artificial microswimmers, alternative concepts to convert chemical energy or heat into directed motion can be employed, which are potentially more efficient. The dynamics of microswimmers comprises many facets, which are all required to achieve locomotion. In this article, we review the physics of locomotion of biological and synthetic microswimmers, and the collective behavior of their assemblies. Starting from individual microswimmers, we describe the various propulsion mechanism of biological and synthetic systems and address the hydrodynamic aspects of swimming. This comprises synchronization and the concerted beating of flagella and cilia. In addition, the swimming behavior next to surfaces is examined. Finally, collective and cooperate phenomena of various types of isotropic and anisotropic swimmers with and without hydrodynamic interactions are discussed.

/pdf/physics-of-microswimmers-single-particle-motion-and-4vxoi085wf.pdf

Physics of microswimmers--single particle motion and collective behavior: a review.

Surfaces designed so that drops do not adhere to them but instead bounce off have received substantial attention because of their ability to stay dry, self-clean and resist icing. A drop striking a non-wetting surface of this type will spread out to a maximum diameter and then recoil to such an extent that it completely rebounds and leaves the solid material. The amount of time that the drop is in contact with the solid--the 'contact time'--depends on the inertia and capillarity of the drop, internal dissipation and surface-liquid interactions. And because contact time controls the extent to which mass, momentum and energy are exchanged between drop and surface, it is often advantageous to minimize it. The conventional approach has been to minimize surface-liquid interactions that can lead to contact line pinning; but even in the absence of any surface interactions, drop hydrodynamics imposes a minimum contact time that was conventionally assumed to be attained with axisymmetrically spreading and recoiling drops. Here we demonstrate that it is possible to reduce the contact time below this theoretical limit by using superhydrophobic surfaces with a morphology that redistributes the liquid mass and thereby alters the drop hydrodynamics. We show theoretically and experimentally that this approach allows us to reduce the overall contact time between a bouncing drop and a surface below what was previously thought possible.

Reducing the contact time of a bouncing drop

When a liquid drop contacts a wettable surface, the liquid spreads over the solid to minimize the total surface energy. The first moments of spreading tend to be rapid. For example, a millimeter-sized water droplet will wet an area having the same diameter as the drop within a millisecond. For perfectly wetting systems, this spreading is inertially dominated. Here we identify that even in the presence of a contact line, the initial wetting is dominated by inertia rather than viscosity. We find that the spreading radius follows a power-law scaling in time where the exponent depends on the equilibrium contact angle. We propose a model, consistent with the experimental results, in which the surface spreading is regulated by the generation of capillary waves.

/pdf/short-time-dynamics-of-partial-wetting-1tghxnbc6q.pdf

Short-Time Dynamics of Partial Wetting

The movement of drops in electric fields plays a role in processes as diverse as storm cloud formation, ink-jet printing and lab-on-a-chip manipulations. An important factor in practical applications is the tendency for adjacent drops to coalesce, usually assumed to be favoured if drops are oppositely charged and attracted to each other. Now Ristenpart et al. show that when oppositely charged drops move towards each other in an electric field whose strength exceeds a critical value, the drops simply 'bounce' off one another. This observation calls for a re-evaluation of our understanding of all processes involving electrically induced drop motion. Adjacent drops of fluid coalesce, and oppositely charged drops have long been assumed to experience an attractive force that favours their coalescence. However, here it is observed that oppositely charged drops moving towards each other in a strong electric field do not coalesce when the field strength exceeds a certain value but rather 'bounce' off one another. This observation calls for a re-evaluation of our understanding of processes such as storm cloud formation and ink-jet printing, which involve electrically induced droplet motion. Electric fields induce motion in many fluid systems, including polymer melts1, surfactant micelles2 and colloidal suspensions3. Likewise, electric fields can be used to move liquid drops4. Electrically induced droplet motion manifests itself in processes as diverse as storm cloud formation5, commercial ink-jet printing6, petroleum and vegetable oil dehydration7, electrospray ionization for use in mass spectrometry8, electrowetting9 and lab-on-a-chip manipulations10. An important issue in practical applications is the tendency for adjacent drops to coalesce, and oppositely charged drops have long been assumed to experience an attractive force that favours their coalescence11,12,13. Here we report the existence of a critical field strength above which oppositely charged drops do not coalesce. We observe that appropriately positioned and oppositely charged drops migrate towards one another in an applied electric field; but whereas the drops coalesce as expected at low field strengths, they are repelled from one another after contact at higher field strengths. Qualitatively, the drops appear to ‘bounce’ off one another. We directly image the transient formation of a meniscus bridge between the bouncing drops, and propose that this temporary bridge is unstable with respect to capillary pressure when it forms in an electric field exceeding a critical strength. The observation of oppositely charged drops bouncing rather than coalescing in strong electric fields should affect our understanding of any process involving charged liquid drops, including de-emulsification, electrospray ionization and atmospheric conduction.

Non-coalescence of oppositely charged drops

http://absimage.aps.org/image/DFD09/MWS_DFD09-2009-001564.pdf

Thin liquid films, such as soap bubbles, have been studied extensively for over a century because they are easily formed and mediate a wide range of transport processes in physics, chemistry and engineering. When a bubble on a liquid-gas or solid-gas interface (referred to herein as an interfacial bubble) ruptures, the general expectation is that the bubble vanishes. More precisely, the ruptured thin film is expected to retract rapidly until it becomes part of the interface, an event that typically occurs within milliseconds. The assumption that ruptured bubbles vanish is central to theories on foam evolution and relevant to health and climate because bubble rupture is a source for aerosol droplets. Here we show that for a large range of fluid parameters, interfacial bubbles can create numerous small bubbles when they rupture, rather than vanishing. We demonstrate, both experimentally and numerically, that the curved film of the ruptured bubble can fold and entrap air as it retracts. The resulting toroidal geometry of the trapped air is unstable, leading to the creation of a ring of smaller bubbles. The higher pressure associated with the higher curvature of the smaller bubbles increases the absorption of gas into the liquid, and increases the efficiency of rupture-induced aerosol dispersal.

James Bird

Papers

Reducing the contact time of a bouncing drop

Short-Time Dynamics of Partial Wetting

Non-coalescence of oppositely charged drops

Non-coalescence of oppositely charged drops

Daughter bubble cascades produced by folding of ruptured thin films