In the headlines

Through six talks by Laura Schaedel (Saarbrücken), Atef Asnacios, Marc Durand, Jonathan Fouchard (Paris), Angélique Stéphanou and Philippe Marmottant (Grenoble), we will consider the dynamics of living matter from the molecular scale of the cytoskeleton up to an entire organsim, in systems ranging from tumours to plants and with both experimental and numerical approaches.

While this dimer is one of the simplest molecular complexes, it is also one of the most fragile. Its detection at room temperature took the community by surprise.

In this month’s issue of Nature Physics, Dorian Bouchet proposes a popular science article about the Fisher information. This quantity, which is a cornerstone in statistical estimation theory, also emerges an an important quantity in different areas of physics.

Emmanuel Siéfert, who joined LIPhy this year as a CNRS research fellow, has just been awarded a “Starting” grant from the European Research Council (ERC), which provides substantial funding for projects by young researchers.

Scientists at LIPhy have demonstrated the existence of a behavioral transition when the environment of zebrafish becomes too crowded, showing the extent to which the collective school structure resists the structural complexity of the surrounding environment.

A new implantable pancreatic bioreactor device has been developed by the SyNaBi team in the TIMC laboratory (Translational Innovation in Medicine and Complexity), in collaboration with Grenoble Alpes University Hospital and the LIPhy (3D printing) and LBFA (Laboratory of Fundamental and Applied Bioenergetics) laboratories.

The "matostheque" is an online tool for reserving small items of materials. Materials owners add the characteristics and availability of their material to the database. Users can then make a loan request, specifying the dates.

The study and understanding of the collective movement of animals is a topic of interdisciplinary interest that has long attracted the attention of many scientists (in statistical physics, hydrodynamics, ethology, biology, sociology, and now even in the strongly emergent field of robotics).

The School "Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation: new trends in theories and experiments" will be held in École de Physique des Houches, 14-26 April 2024.

Population dynamics used in large-deviation theory are in correspondence with models of biological phenomena in genetics and ecology.

An international team has shown that the’ buckling instability of’a layer of lipids deposited on the surface of’a microbubble produces a propulsion force that can lead to displacements of the order of m/s, of the’, a promising discovery for applications in the medical field.

In hydrodynamics, a lift phenomenon arises when a force acts on an object perpendicularly to its initial motion. In everyday life, we are familiar with this effect allowing for instance planes to take off or soccer balls to follow bent trajectories.

Thanks to 3D-printed cages, we've shown that bubbles can be stabilized in water in any shape: cubes, spheres, even rings. Here, we're printing a large number of 2cm ring bubbles, arranged on a large circle to create an acoustic tokamak.

Les mouvements de foule sont observés chez différentes espèces et à différentes échelles, des insectes aux mammifères, ainsi que dans des systèmes non cognitifs, tels que les cellules motiles.

The first kaleidoscope was made in the early 1800s by Sir David Brewster, who was seduced by the beauty of the patterns generated, both symmetrical and very complex. In a recent study carried out within the Grenoble Interdisciplinary Physics Laboratory (LIPhy - CNRS/UGA) and published in PNAS, scientists demonstrate that the kaleidoscopic effect, beyond its artistic function, can be usefully exploited by scientists. working with fiber optics.

Misaki Ozawa in the PSM team at LIPhy received a junior chair from Multidisciplinary Institute in Artificial Intelligence (MIAI), including a funding for a three-year postdoc.

The action potential, which is the principle electrical signal that carries the information in the brain, initiates in the axon initial segment.

Eight laboratories of the Mécabio Santé research group have shared their know-how and methods to study the influence of the storage and preparation of blood samples on the mechanical behavior of red blood cells. Published in the Biophysical Journal, this work has led to new recommendations to standardize practices and facilitate the comparability of measurements between laboratories.

By combining tissue engineering and optogenetics, biophysicists have transformed cells into biological microactuators in order to study the spatio-temporal propagation of mechanical signals in biological tissues and to characterize the architecture and viscoelastic properties of these tissues.

Researchers have shown that the deformability of red blood cells is an essential ingredient for their homogeneous diffusion in the terminal network of blood vessels, when the diameter of the vessels is only slightly larger than the size of the cells.

Organisms have adapted to thrive in a narrow, well-defined temperature range. Humans are comfortable in ambient conditions, but other organisms can withstand much higher temperatures, even above the boiling temperature of water. How temperature kills a cell is not completely understood, but it is crucial in many ways. For example, to understand how life evolved on our planet, and how it can potentially develop elsewhere. We also need to consider how even small changes in temperature in the environment due to climate issues can throw the current distribution of living organisms out of balance. Finally, how therapeutic approaches can be optimized to kill cancer cells by locally increasing the temperature of the cells.