The rates of stem cell division determine the cell cycle lengths of its lineage.

Adult stem cells and their transit-amplifying progeny alter their proliferation rates to maintain tissue homeostasis. To test how the division rates of stem cells and transit-amplifying progeny affect tissue growth and differentiation, we developed a computation strategy that estimates the average cell-cycle lengths (lifespans) of germline stem cells and their progeny from fixed-tissue demography in the Drosophila testis. Analysis of the wild-type data using this method indicated that during the germline transit-amplification, the cellular lifespans extend by nearly 1.3-fold after the first division and shrink by about 2-folds after the second division. Cell-autonomous perturbations of the stem cell lifespan accordingly altered the lifespans of successive transit-amplifying stages. Remarkably, almost 2-fold alterations in the lifespans of stem cells and their immediate daughters did not affect the subsequent differentiation. The results indicate that the early germline division rates can adjust the following division rates and the onset of differentiation.

Moulding three-dimensional curved structures by selective heating.

It is of interest to fabricate curved surfaces in three dimensions from homogeneous material in the form of flat sheets. The aim is not just to obtain a surface which has a desired intrinsic Riemannian metric, but to get the desired embedding in R 3 up to translations and rotations. In this paper, we demonstrate three generic methods of moulding a flat sheet of thermo-responsive plastic by selective contraction induced by targeted heating. These methods do not involve any cutting and gluing, which is a property they share with origami. The first method is inspired by tailoring, which is the usual method for making garments out of plain pieces of cloth. Unlike usual tailoring, this method produces the desired embedding in R 3 . The second method just aims to bring about the desired new Riemannian metric via an appropriate pattern of local contractions, without directly controlling the embedding. The third method is based on triangulation, and seeks to induce the desired local distances. This results in getting the desired embedding in R 3 . The second and the third methods, and also the first method for the special case of surfaces of revolution, are algorithmic in nature. We explain these methods and show examples.

On the geometric phenomenology of static friction.

In this note we introduce a hierarchy of phase spaces for static friction, which give a graphical way to systematically quantify the directional dependence in static friction via subregions of the phase spaces. We experimentally plot these subregions to obtain phenomenological descriptions for static friction in various examples where the macroscopic shape of the object affects the frictional response. The phase spaces have the universal property that for any experiment in which a given object is put on a substrate fashioned from a chosen material with a specified nature of contact, the frictional behaviour can be read off from a uniquely determined classifying map on the control space of the experiment which takes values in the appropriate phase space.

Granular self-organization by autotuning of friction.

A monolayer of granular spheres in a cylindrical vial, driven continuously by an orbital shaker and subjected to a symmetric confining centrifugal potential, self-organizes to form a distinctively asymmetric structure which occupies only the rear half-space. It is marked by a sharp leading edge at the potential minimum and a curved rear. The area of the structure obeys a power-law scaling with the number of spheres. Imaging shows that the regulation of motion of individual spheres occurs via toggling between two types of motion, namely, rolling and sliding. A low density of weakly frictional rollers congregates near the sharp leading edge whereas a denser rear comprises highly frictional sliders. Experiments further suggest that because the rolling and sliding friction coefficients differ substantially, the spheres acquire a local time-averaged coefficient of friction within a large range of intermediate values in the system. The various sets of spatial and temporal configurations of the rollers and sliders constitute the internal states of the system. Experiments demonstrate and simulations confirm that the global features of the structure are maintained robustly by autotuning of friction through these internal states, providing a previously unidentified route to self-organization of a many-body system.