ADVANCED MATERIALS & PROCESSES | MAY 2026 7 project alongside BGSU and the University of Toledo include several global organizations headquartered regionally that are leaders in glassmaking, building materials, and solar panels. The new endeavor’s most ambitious undertaking is the simultaneous optimization of competing goals. Abouheaf and his team plan to develop a data-driven, multi-objective optimization tool to balance energy efficiency, nitrous oxide emissions, control input constraints, and boundary-condition robustness. bgsu.edu. MATERIALS THAT DEVELOP DIRECTION Scientists at the University of Vienna discovered an unusual phenomenon: Polymer chains with segments that fluctuate at different intensities can spontaneously develop directional, persistent motion when densely packed, even though nothing in the system points them in any certain direction. Driven by fundamental physical constraints, the researchers believe this “entropic tug of war” could help explain how DNA organizes and moves inside living cells and may even lead to new materials. “Think of a chain threaded through a dense forest of trees, which represent obstacles posed by the other chains in the system. One end of the chain is being shaken much more vigorously than the other,” explains researcher Jan Smrek. “You might expect it to just wiggle randomly in place. But we found that because the chain has to find its way by going in between the trees, the difference in shaking intensity creates an imbalance that actually propels the entire chain forward through the forest.” The team used computer simulations and analytical theory to show that this directed motion arises purely from topological constraints. When polymer chains are entangled and cannot pass through each other, segments with stronger fluctuations generate larger entropic forces. This creates an imbalance that pushes the entire chain forward along its own contour, with the stronger fluctuating part acting as the head and moving through the obstacles. “This work bridges materials science and biology,” says Smrek. “We’re showing that the same physics that governs synthetic polymers can explain behaviors in living systems. And it suggests we could design new materials that spontaneously develop directed transport properties.” www.univie.ac.at. Depiction of polymer chains that appear to “crawl” like a worm. The tip of the orange segment (stronger fluctuations than acting on the gray segment) has three options to move forward (dashed arrows). Courtesy of Jan Smrek.
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