There are few sights more spectacular than the swarming of a school of fish or a flock of birds that suddenly gives way to a directional motion. Arguably, our admiration is rooted in the surprise that individual organisms, capable of self-propulsion on their own, organize to move en masse in a coherent fashion. Coherent motion is common in a large class of biological and synthetic materials that are often referred to as active matter. Such materials consist of particles immersed in a fluid that can extract energy from their surroundings (or internal fuel) and convert it into directed motion. Living organisms, biological tissues, rods on a vibrated plate, and self-phoretic colloids are just a few examples (1). Similar to schools of fish and flocks of birds, active matter often exhibits random swarming motion (2–5) that until now was impossible to control or use. On page 1284 of this issue, Wu et al. (6) demonstrate that an active fluid can be manipulated to flow in a particular direction without any external stimuli by confining it in microchannels.
From chaos to order in active fluids
Alexander Morozov
Science 24 Mar 2017:
Vol. 355, Issue 6331, pp. 1262-1263
DOI: 10.1126/science.aam8998
Source: science.sciencemag.org
Complexity Digest 